Sunnyvale, California-based Web pioneer Yahoo pushed forward with plans to offer its 500 million  users worldwide redesigned homepage, music and email sites featuring more third party services such as Netflix movie and Apple iTunes music access, executives with the company said on the eve of hosting a Friday conference for outside developers. Yahoo described the changes, which it said would be rolled out during the next few weeks and months, during a briefing at its headquarters. Amazon.com, iTunes Links Possible In Redesign The new Yahoo Mail site will offer its 275 million monthly users access to services from outside companies such as classified advertising sites, while the company's popular news site Yahoo News will see more local news from newspapers around the United States, Yahoo said. The moves are all part of the grand restructuring plan the company calls its Yahoo Open Strategy, an ambitious initiative announced earlier this year by Yahoo co-founder and chief executive Jerry Yang for unifying the company's online services such as email, photo and bookmark management, instant messaging and calendar planning, by allowing its customers to use a single profile and command center. With the plan Yang hopes to create a new more social network-like environment for both developers and consumers, a challenge that is expected to be taken up Friday when more than 300 programmers will descend on Yahoo's "Hack Day" conference in Sunnyvale. A redesigned Yahoo music portal, Yahoo Music, is expected to offer instant access to music downloading features from rival services such as iTunes and Amazon.com within the next few weeks, and allow users who log into Yahoo's main site the ability to add custom links to outside Web properties, much like they can already do using Web browser features. About 300 million of Yahoo's users worldwide regularly log in to the company's services. Building Social Into Everything Yahoo Does At an April event announcing the Yahoo Open Strategy, Yahoo chief technology officer Ari Balogh said the changes at the company would be major. "We are not building another social network," Balogh said. "We are building social into everything we do. We are literally in the process of rewiring Yahoo from the inside out." On Thursday Yahoo head of audience products group Ash Patel said the changes will also help  advertisers. "Yahoo allows developers to create applications for the world's biggest audience," Patel noted. "And they're able to do monetization for advertising. Those two are huge value propositions," he added. Of the rollout of the forthcoming changes Patel said consumers will see "a rolling-thunder kind of thing," while declining to give specific release dates. Balogh, who joined Yahoo the day before Microsoft first revealed its intention to acquire the firm for $44.6 billion, saw 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 when unveiling Yahoo Open Strategy in April. Yahoo Open Strategy Plan Pushes Forward With Property Redesigns Featuring More Third Party Content According to Balogh, Yahoo's half billion monthly visitors may have as many as 10 billion untapped social networking connections comprised of address books, instant messaging buddy lists, email addresses and other forms of shared links. Yahoo has been working on the various parts of its Open Strategy plan since September 2007, and it may not be until next year when the system is complete and ready for all consumers to use, Balogh noted early this year. The changes to Yahoo's homepage were to be the first major alterations since May 2006, and will incorporate so-called widgets -- small programs that perform a function such as letting users review their latest Netflix movie requests -- as well as email applications that Patel said would help Yahoo users send online invitations and collections of photos without leaving the firm's hosted email environment. Scott Moore, the head of Yahoo's media group, stressed the importance of Yahoo Open Strategy and the social networking-like features being added to the company's Web properties. "We are not just doing this open thing because it is the flavor of the month," Moore said. "This open approach is really in our DNA." Related Links:
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8:03 pm on Sep. 12, 2008 (utc 0)