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Embattled Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo has begun a major plan to unify its myriad online services and create a new more social network-like environment for both developers and consumers, the Web pioneer announced Thursday at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco. The ambitious initiative, called Yahoo Open Strategy, will unify the company's online services such as e-mail, photo and bookmark management, instant messaging and calendar planning, by allowing Yahoo's 500 million monthly visitors worldwide to use a single profile and command center. Yahoo Plan Amounts To A Major Rewiring While the move may to some appear as maneuvering to become more like top social networking Web sites MySpace and Facebook, Yahoo was quick to point out that its Open Strategy plan will be about more than imitation. "We are not building another social network," said Yahoo chief technology officer Ari Balogh, speaking to an audience of more than 1,000 at the Thursday conference. "We are building social into everything we do," said Balogh, adding, "We are literally in the process of rewiring Yahoo from the inside out." Neil Sample, Yahoo chief architect of platforms, sees his company's Open Strategy plan as a process of bringing together the pieces of its existing social networking puzzle. "There's a massive, latent social network within Yahoo, and we're going to bring it to the surface," Sample wrote Thursday in a message on the company's Yodel Anecdotal blog. "We're making Yahoo more social, but we're not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network, we just need to unlock it," added Sample. Yahoo Touts Open Strategy Plan Unifying Web Services The Open Strategy plan would unite a collection of hitherto unconnected user profiles on such Yahoo Web properties as photo-sharing site Flickr and bookmarking site Del.icio.us, and would allow users to control how  much personal information they wish to share with online friends, co-workers and family members, and to customize their Yahoo identity with various applications the company hopes will be programmed by developers using another new branch of its plan. Yahoo expects to soon allow developers to author applications that will work with and tap into the features of each of Yahoo's various Web properties, under another Open Strategy program it has called the Yahoo Application Platform. YAP developers will be able to host their applications on Yahoo servers, offloading the task of maintaining independent servers, in an environment that is expected to be similar to search giant Google's recently launched application engine service called the Google App Engine. While Yahoo has offered various open application programming interfaces (APIs) in the past, the scope will increase dramatically under the Open Strategy plan, Yahoo said. "It includes opening it up in a way we have never done before," said Balogh. "It's about making the entire Yahoo experience more social," he added. Yahoo's Social Dimension To Broaden Later This Year Yahoo expects to launch portions of the Open Strategy initiative throughout the remainder of the year, however one piece has already been put in place, with the launch Thursday of a test version of the company's Search Monkey developer platform, which SearchEngineWorld previewed in February when it was announced. Yahoo said Web site owners can use the publisher program to add new types of information such as photos, addresses, related stories, reviews, contact information and ratings to the basic descriptions currently shown on Yahoo's search engine listings. Yahoo said that participation in its Open Search Platform will not alter the position of a publisher's Web site, and also noted that it will not accept payment for improved positioning in publisher plug-in galleries or in promotions. Some industry analysts have expressed concerns that users may not readily flock to the altered search results, or trust additions made by those trying to improve their own search engine listing positions. Balogh, who joined Yahoo the day before Microsoft first revealed its intention to acquire the firm for $44.6 billion, sees the Open Strategy plan as a fundamental change in how Yahoo operates. "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," Balogh said in the Thursday keynote speech. Yahoo has only one day before a Saturday deadline imposed by Microsoft, after which Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of the world's biggest software company, has indicated Microsoft could seek to overthrow Yahoo's board of directors with a slate of its own, lower his company's buyout offer, or even move on without Yahoo. Access Yahoo Address Book on Third-Party Web Sites The Yahoo Open Strategy envisions applications running on various third-party Web sites that are able to connect to Yahoo address books and take advantage of the information there, along with tools for social  activation, graphing and event management, according to Balogh. "We are going to unify all profiles throughout Yahoo," Balogh said. "We are going to rewire the entire experience at Yahoo to make it social in every dimension," he added. According to Balogh, Yahoo's half billion monthly visitors may have as many as 10 billion untapped social connections comprised of address books, instant messaging buddy lists, e-mail addresses and other forms of shared links. "Social is not a destination - it's a dimension and it will infuse all aspects of a consumer's experience on the Web," Balogh said. Yahoo has been working on the various parts of its Open Strategy plan since September 2007, and it may not be until 2009 when the system is complete and ready for all consumers to use, Balogh noted. Hoping To Fare Better Than Prior Yahoo 360 Service While Yahoo has not previously launched anything like its Open Strategy plan, it has had entries in the social networking market, such as its recently shuttered Yahoo 360 social network, and has also shown its willingness to enter into the move towards open standards with moves such as its March agreement to join the Google-driven Open Social initiative and January support of the OpenID open source Web identification system. In 2006 Yahoo signaled its recognition of the growing importance of online social networking when it offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion, an offer that was turned down. Although only one piece of the Open Strategy plan has been put in place by Yahoo, with the test of Search Monkey, the greater overall initiative from a company which controls nearby 60 percent of the total Web audience, according to Web traffic measurement firm comScore, is likely to have a sizable future impact on MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites. Related Links:
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9:45 pm on April 25, 2008 (utc 0)
