UMS contributor Jason Johnson recently sat down with Jonathan LeBlanc (@jcleblanc) from the Yahoo Developer Network to discuss Yahoo’s YQL and gives some details on how to use it in your own applications.

The Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, and join data across Web services. With YQL, apps run faster with fewer lines of code and a smaller network footprint.

Yahoo! and other websites across the Internet make much of their structured data available to developers, primarily through Web services. To access and query these services, developers traditionally endure the pain of locating the right URLs and documentation to access and query each Web service.

Jonathan LeBlanc works with the partner integration group in the Yahoo! Developer Network as a senior software engineer / technology evangelist. Focusing on partner relationships and training, as well as external developer integration, Jonathan works with and promotes emerging technologies to aid in the adoption and utilization of new social development techniques.