I was at the Yahoo! Open Hack Day this weekend with my friend and colleague Sundar. For the most part, it was a lot of fun.

The hacking started at 5pm on Friday and went on till 5pm on Saturday. I had finished my hacks by late night and got really bored from then. Tired too. It seems I am becoming old quite fast! There were times when I could did go without without sleep for 60 hours straight and here I was tired in just half as much.

I did a couple hacks by myself:

Google Search Assist: An implementation of Yahoo! Search Assist for Google. Well, almost.

Del.icio.us Tag Management: A set of ruby scripts that allow you to deal with your tags in del.icio.us in a more automated fashion. The first script identifies duplicates like “movie” and “movies”, asks you which to keep and automatically renames all tags accordingly. The second script allows you to keep del.icio.us tag bundles updated.

and helped Sundar a bit with another hack:

Zooky: Find precise answers related to local, movies, restaurants, ringtones, ATMs, and a lot more info. You can also ask or tell your friends about your find! All from within Y! Messenger whether they’re online or not. We’ll probably be releasing an enhanced version of this in the future.

I won the Best “Really Needs an Interface” hack award for the del.icio.us tag. Christian Heilmann, a UI guru from Yahoo! UK gave me a book (that he co-wrote) as the prize. The book is, aptly, about web interfaces. Thanks, Chris!

Even better than the award was a comment I got about the same del.icio.us hack: “that’s the only hack among all the hacks here that I see myself using.” Thanks, Naseer!

Check out all the hacks that were presented, there sure were some very interesting ones: results of the Open Hack Day Bangalore 2007.