Today, Yahoo has gone live with it’s “open strategy” or Y!OS, which is Yahoo’s way of opening up their products to third party developers in order to attract wider use, and to come up with some useful functionalities that will help them compete better with companies like Google and Microsoft.
Y!OS consists of three major components:
I’m not going to get into the technical developer talk about all of these, but you can find out about that stuff via the links above. Yahoo’s been doing a lot of “opening up” lately. Not only have they turned Yahoo user profiles into an open, social experience, they have been integrating SearchMonkey projects into regular search results.
SearchMonkey is Yahoo Search’s open platform, which allows developers and site owners to make results more useful and relevant on a personalized basis. Developers can build their apps with SearchMonkey, then use it themselves and/or share them with others. The significance is that Yahoo is starting to put some SearchMonkey-based apps in the results on their own:
Now that developers have all of these tools at their disposal courtesy of Yahoo, we should expect a lot more “opening up” in the future. “In 2008, it’s been all about building the base platform,” says Sam Pullara, Vice President, Yahoo! Application Platform. “For the rest of the year and into 2009, we’ll focus on integrating the platform into [the] rest of Yahoo!.”
According to Pullara, users will begin to experience a “social dimension” as they activate the network across services like Yahoo mail, and Yahoo Messenger, and developers have the opportunity to create some cool things for these and even the Yahoo front page. It will certainly be interesting to see where this goes.
