Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo has launched a major initiative to unify its myriad online services and create a  new more social network-like environment for consumers, with Tuesday's release of Yahoo Open Strategy for developers. The platform, dubbed Y!OS, was first described by Yahoo in April as a Web framework of sorts created to help unify the company's online services such as e-mail, photo and bookmark management, instant messaging and calendar planning, by allowing the Web pioneer's 500 million monthly visitors worldwide to use a single profile and command center. The image below courtesy of Yahoo illustrates some of the connections Yahoo has made possible with the Open Strategy platform.  Yahoo Launches Open Strategy Plan Unifying Web Services Chief among Yahoo's hopes for the platform are bringing more new users to its services and keeping those it already has using the company's advertising-supported services, tasks Yahoo Open Strategy has set out to accomplish by giving application developers the tools to integrate Yahoo services with those of other Web businesses both small and large. "We’ve built the whole system with the mentality that any personal data that you put into Yahoo is inherently your data; you own it, and you can give it to anyone or take it anywhere you would like," Jay Rossiter, Yahoo Open Strategy senior vice president, said Tuesday in a message announcing the developer launch posted on the company's blog. From a developer perspective the platform is comprised of several tools, application programming interfaces (APIs) and Yahoo's own database query language, called Yahoo Query Language (YQL), with which Yahoo hope to entice programmers looking to tap into new and creative methods of making a two-way street between outside applications and its own services such as popular photo-sharing site Flickr and its finance, sports and e-mail features. Next Step Towards Building Social Into Everything Yahoo Does "By using the social contacts you already have on Yahoo — through Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Finance, Fantasy  Sports, etc. — we’ll make those social connections more active and useful," Rossiter said in the Tuesday announcement. Yahoo said that the developer launch was only the start of what it hopes will eventually be a vast array of new connection between Yahoo's services and those on the Web properties of company's such as Netflix, eBay and CNN. Yahoo co-founder and chief executive first announced Yahoo Open Strategy in April as a way to create a new more social network-like environment for both Yahoo developers and consumers. 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." Developers Now Have Access To Y!OS Platform Rossiter said Tuesday that Yahoo had come a long way since April's platform announcement. "As of today, developers can start using our newly available data on their own Web sites and even start deploying new applications into Yahoo," Rossiter said. Yahoo has worked on the platform since September 2007, including consultation with rivals including Internet search leader Google and social network MySpace in creating the Y!OS platform, Rossiter said. At an April event announcing the Yahoo Open Strategy, Yahoo chief technology officer Ari Balogh said the platform was set to start "rewiring Yahoo from the inside out, across all of our properties, [and] to fundamentally open up those Web services and provide a consistent development model, a consistent deployment and consumer experience as well." 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, e-mail addresses and other forms of shared links. Open Strategy Initiative Launch Aims To Expand Yahoo's Embrace Of Web Last month Yahoo previewed Yahoo Open Strategy at a conference for outside developers, and last week the company announced that over the next several months it would lay off 10 percent of its workers, about 1,500 people. Once developers have begun using the new platform, Yahoo said that users will be able to "see what your friends are doing on Yahoo (...) and off our network," by using "incredibly unique and creative new experiences," according to Rossiter. The release also marked Yahoo's first implementation of support for OpenSocial, the alliance formed by competitor Google in October 2007 to make it easier for programmers to popularize their applications on multiple social networking and other Web sites. Yahoo joined the OpenSocial Foundation in March. Yahoo said that it had begun merging its users into a new type of unified profile. "We’ve begun the process of consolidating everyone’s Yahoo experience onto a new, single profile," Rossiter said of the new so-called social control panel available at profiles.yahoo.com. Related Links :
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9:23 pm on Oct. 29, 2008 (utc 0)