Well, it seems that I get to quote Greg Linden a second time today. He points to the Yahoo’s Personality Crisis article that’s been stirring up a bit of discussion about whether Yahoo! will be opened or closed.
Will Yahoo Be Open or Closed?
Editor’s Note: Will Yahoo continue to list non-Yahoo properties on their site? Discuss at WebProWorld.
Yahoo’s Personality Crisis (subscription only)
Is Yahoo! going to build a walled garden or give users what they really want, regardless of where the content lives: on Yahoo! or elsewhere?
In his posting, he says:
I’m more optimistic than the Economist that Yahoo will be open. Yahoo’s recent features seem to trend toward embracing content from non-Yahoo sites. I suspect Yahoo will seek to have the best content on Yahoo, but will pull in good content from wherever on the Web it resides.
Well said, Greg.
If the trend hasn’t been obvious in the past couple of years, more non-Yahoo hosted content has been appearing on Yahoo since… well, probably since the early days when Yahoo did little more that point you to other stuff on the Web. Look at what we did with My Yahoo!. Check Yahoo! News. Not to mention the bazillions of RSS feeds we’ve been pumping out: News, Search, Flickr, Finance, Groups, 360, My Web, and more. Yahoo! is probably one of the biggest f’ing aggregators of third party content in the world.
The day that the walls start to go up around the garden is the day I find myself another job. The Internet is a better place when we knock down those walls–not build them. I want no part of building them.
Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.
Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.
