Yahoo to radically open its platforms

by Juan Carlos Peréz

April 24, 2008 —

Yahoo is swinging the doors
of its Web platforms wide open to let outside developers create applications
across its network of sites, as well as radically stitching together its online
services under the social profile concept.

The idea is to let the hundreds of millions of people who use its Web mail,
instant messaging, calendar, photo management and other online services replicate
the social experience that social networks like MySpace
and Facebook have made
so popular.

This means that Yahoo users will have a profile under which their Yahoo services
will fall, and which users will be able to customize by adding applications.
This profile will also simplify the map of connections between Yahoo users so
that they can find each other and interact more easily and efficiently.

If Yahoo is able to bring this vision to reality, it could pose a major threat
to the appeal of MySpace, Facebook and other social networks, and give Yahoo
the boost it has been seeking for years among Web users.

"It is rewiring Yahoo from the inside out, across all of our properties,
to fundamentally open up those Web services and provide a consistent development
model, a consistent deployment and consumer experience as well," said Ari
Balogh, Yahoo's chief technology officer, during a keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo
in San Francisco on Thursday.

While Yahoo has had open APIs (application programming interfaces) for a variety
of its services for years, Balogh said this initiative will take those efforts
to much greater lengths, and it will include streamlining the development process
so that it's uniform for developers across Yahoo platforms, he said. "It
includes opening it up in a way we have never done before. It's about making
the entire Yahoo experience more social," he said.

The process is already ongoing, as Yahoo on Thursday announced the opening
up in beta of its Search Monkey development environment, which lets external
developers customize Yahoo search results to make them, in theory, more relevant
and richer with information. Yahoo had announced its intention to do this in
February.

Yahoo expects to hit more significant milestones in its opening-up process
throughout the year, he said.

With this vision, Yahoo seems to be finally tossing out the window its failed
and misguided attempts to compete against MySpace and Facebook by creating a
straight-ahead social networking site, like its disappointing Yahoo 360.

Instead, Yahoo is going to attempt to harness its users worldwide, which have
some 10 billion latent social relationships already established amongst themselves
via their Yahoo Messenger contact lists, Yahoo Mail address books and the like.

By unifying all Yahoo user profiles, Yahoo will create its own consistent social
graph for the benefit of both consumers and developers, he said. From the social
graph, Yahoo will be able to establish relevant connections among users, as
well as event streams of what people are doing online, which are popular on
Facebook and via FriendFeed.

"We don't think of social as a destination. We think of social as a dimension.
It infuses every element of the consumer's experience on the Web," Balogh
said.

Yahoo will also take care of making sure that people are in control of the
applications they opt to add and thus share data with, as well as making sure
that data is kept safe.

IDG News Service