Developer welcome mat

Posted April 24th, 2008 at 10:16 am by Neal Sample, Platforms

 29 Comments / Filed in: Conferences/Events, Trends & News

You’re a developer. Your dream is to impact an insane number of people with your work. And you’re impatient — you don’t want to start small, dazzling just a few people with your coding wares.

Enter the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS). Imagine a world where you can write code that will meaningfully reach millions of users in a single bound. That’s the promise of an open Yahoo!.

Ari Balogh, our new CTO, just offered a preview at Web 2.0 Expo of a very new kind of Yahoo!. One that invites developers to take advantage of our huge scale to write applications that build on our existing properties (think Mail, Sports, Search, our front page, mobile, My Yahoo!, etc.), tap into millions of loyal users, and make Internet experience more relevant and useful. You’ve heard us hint at this for a while and now it’s right around the corner.

Think about it: Yahoo! serves more than 500 million unique users every month. We serve 120 billion page views per month. Yahoo! users spend 235 billion minutes a month on our sites. More importantly, some 10 billion relationships exist on user buddy lists and in Yahoo! address books. All that represents a mind-boggling audience for developers.

There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo!, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. 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.

We are rewiring Yahoo!, building platforms that fundamentally change how Yahoo! works. We’re also opening up to developers to take advantage of the social aspects of our many favored destinations, creating what we call “vitality” — a lifeline into what’s happening with your social connections. We plan to open the best platform on the web, where tens of thousands of developers will create applications and features (many we’ve never even thought of) for our network and our consumers.

Of course, lots of Internet companies are on the “open” bandwagon. In fact, the bandwagon is getting pretty crowded (I’ve never actually seen a bandwagon, but go with me on this). Yahoo! has been in the “open” camp for years, starting simple with RSS feeds in 2003. And now Flickr is the second-most popular API on the Web. We’ve also been a leader in industry’s efforts to embrace open development.

A first taste of our strategy is SearchMonkey, which will let developers mash up helpful data with our search engine results. A Japanese restaurant would no longer be a simple link. Instead, it could include a photo, address, ratings, reviews, and links to online reservations. Search Monkey will be available in a few weeks. Make sure you come to our launch party on May 15th.

And it doesn’t stop there. Y!OS will let developers make Yahoo! portable so that everywhere you go, a more relevant, social and useful online experience is available to you. Shopping on a third-party site? Why not have instant access to your Yahoo! Address Book? I know I want it! ;-)

We’ve previewed Yahoo! OS with leading development shops and they’re very excited to do their thing on Yahoo!. In fact, they plan to dedicate a lot of resources to this platform. It all comes back to the size of the opportunity, right?

Today’s just the beginning. There’s plenty more to come in the months ahead!

UPDATE: Here’s a video of Ari’s Web 2.0 Expo keynote from this morning.

Neal Sample
Chief Architect, Platforms

Tagged: conference, news, open source

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29 Comments Add your own

Jean-Paul | April 24th, 2008 at 3:09 pm

Nice work guys!

Bob Bickel | April 24th, 2008 at 3:36 pm

Will you be supporting Open Social as the API?

MySpace has implemented Open Social. Since Open Social does not support a phote API, they have created their own. Do you expect to collaborate thru Open Social to resolve the differences so an app developer can create one app that uses both Flickr and MySpace photos?

Desmond | April 25th, 2008 at 3:46 am

The heady plans are smart but have come too late.
-Des
http://techwatch.reviewk.com/2008/04/yahoo-social-platform/

dui lawyer san diego | April 25th, 2008 at 6:48 am

This could be the google killer.

Jochem Prins | April 25th, 2008 at 7:07 am

Alright! Nice work guys. This is definitely a good move. Nice to see that you are not aiming at providing yet another social network, by just opening up your data we (as the developer community) will be able to enrich the online experience. Keep up the good work.

Neal Sample | April 25th, 2008 at 10:11 am

@Bob:

We will be supporting OpenSocial throughout the platform. Also, as a founding member of the OpenSocial foundation with Google and MySpace, we will be taking an active role in driving the evolution and maturation of the specification. We’ll certainly be looking at all areas where OpenSocial can be improved and working with the community to address them.

Flickr is a tremendously important API for us and the #2 most-used API on the web! We will definitely be taking a close look at how we can integrate various photo solutions into OpenSocial.

Cheers,
–neal

Frank | April 25th, 2008 at 10:35 am

Its a little creepy that they have those stats for the Buddy Lists and Address Books…

Eek!

Phil Strong | May 1st, 2008 at 8:40 pm

Wow! If Yahoo can pull this off there is no reason to sell to anyone. Hold out and see where this goes.

Masood Siddiqui | May 4th, 2008 at 8:50 pm

To Yahoo Board of Directors including Mr. Yang,

In the light of recent news and your email, please accept my congratulations on rejecting Microsoft’s bid for yahoo Inc.

Please disregard the co-called financial analysts now claiming that Mr. Yang is in the “hot seat” and their other inane and baseless claims.

I and millions of other users of Yahoo are ecstatic that Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s bid.

You will find my self a loyal fan of Yahoo, as I have been for the last 10 years or so, and will remain so in the future God willing.

If and when Microsoft finds a sneaky and underhanded way of acquiring Yahoo, as it has other numerous companies, you can rest assured that I will say good bye to my Yahoo account, just as I did to my Hotmail account years ago.

Once again, please accept my heartiest congratulations, and I wish you the best.

Thanks and sincerely yours,

Masood Siddiqui

DIESEL | May 9th, 2008 at 2:59 am

well…good luck and keep your hard work ;)

Pppbbbbllllttttt | May 9th, 2008 at 10:39 am

Nerds

epistling | May 10th, 2008 at 1:52 pm

Too little too late, I am sure they think everyone will just hop on board with this all too fudged up response to the world of social networking. Alas, they blew to pieces any respect they may have had in the manner they delt with 360°. Everyone and by this I mean BOOMERS have dumped them for greener fields. Maybe they don’t give a hoot about the North American deomgraphic and prefer to spin their wheels in the far east. So be it. The bell has tolled.

Vivianne | May 10th, 2008 at 10:11 pm

It looks Very different! Can’t wait to give it a try

social media platforms | May 23rd, 2008 at 12:47 pm

Good video. When you watch Ari’s video you get the feeling that Ari doesn’t really see his vision. My take anyway

jacob | June 2nd, 2008 at 12:48 pm

Hi guys,
will yahoo let developers to re-order search results?
I would like to get a response from Yahoo.

thanks,
a developer of Yahoo Api

Nicki Dugan | June 2nd, 2008 at 5:04 pm

@Jacob – Actually SearchMonkey has no impact on ranking search results. The goal is simply to display enhanced search results with more meaningful and relevant information than simply web links and abstracts. Our algorithm for search rankings remains entirely based on relevance to keywords and user intent – as it should be.

amit | June 16th, 2008 at 5:59 pm

revulution is open!

Anton | July 8th, 2008 at 8:45 pm

Give the guy a break, and give Yahoo! a break. The company has provided a HUGE service(s) and has as diverse, or more diverse, array of offerings than Google or other web service providers available today. They are competing against some very smart players and compelling offerings. Let’s provide the support, both philosophical and financial, that Yahoo! deserves. Their mail offering is second to none. Their home page is second to none. So if it takes $2 a month to support that, consider the value and pony up. I don’t work for Yahoo!, I am just a highly satisfied user. :-)

Anton

Peter | July 13th, 2008 at 1:06 pm

I was on 360 first, and later on myspace. I’ve been more active on myspace for a while, but eventually closed my registration there and kept my 360. It is just better and has hardly any spammers. Myspace is 90% spammers.

I like yahoo all in all. They have good stuff, although my major search engine is still Google. Sorry about that :p

Japan | July 17th, 2008 at 2:07 am

Excellent write up, very interesting read!

Frank Pen | August 28th, 2008 at 5:46 am

Will the new Universal Service Platform include those funny customizable animated avatars for the blogs? They are the only reason I use 360.

Jean L | September 3rd, 2008 at 10:49 pm

Since it seem nobody is still working for 360 I will put my 2 cent here.

As one previously said, yahoo360 had been embrace by an older generation that Myspace and company. Everthing was fine untill there was some 360 closing rumor and lack of support. Then lots of user had franticly search something similar to 360.
Sadly 360 is unique and seem to be forgotten.
May I remember you that people are aging all over the planet. This is a trend that 360 was answering. No publicity and a nice blog space. I dont mind a bit of publicity but I mind loosing all the work I had put on my blog. Lots of blogger had desert the vessel for this reason.
360 was the best for blog exchange and was fit to a growing and mature type of person.

Its was an open platform since It was easy to create lots of nice pages on the net.

Please review your position on 360, just add a few publicity and support 360 back. On messenger there still a 360 invitation icon as well as shortcut. It look cheap not supporting a main feature.

To me, one of Yahoo problem is trying too many thing. Its like trying to get many women in same time. (men if your a women)

Why not trying to improve what you have instead of trying all kind of new stuff.
Focus to improve what you already develop, your waisting money if you dont. Developing was done!

Not supporting also make supporter angry and they go elsewhere. I now have 4 different account on that elsewhere in case a 360 disapearance. Most of my friend also did the same.

With a few change 360 could had been a publishing suite since its a good htlm editor. With trick of how to do.. That all it was need!

Focus on your existing user first. Yahoo have lot of great free feature, maybe too much. I wish to support Yahoo with my action if Yahoo does the same. Creating web page is my support, 360 is the support. Would you support me?

Mubashir Aamir | September 18th, 2008 at 6:38 am

fun & entertainment

Mubashir Aamir | September 18th, 2008 at 6:45 am

fun

Mubashir Aamir | September 18th, 2008 at 6:48 am

Why not trying to improve what you have instead of trying all kind of new stuff.

seef | December 1st, 2008 at 9:24 am

مراحب ممكن نتعرف بحب الصداقه

yohana(male) | January 27th, 2009 at 12:44 am

I would like to join this ! thanks
let me introduce you my self = my name is yohana ,am 18 , am living in erirea (asmera) . about me .am not female . am male

Jacques Snyman | Website Design | April 13th, 2009 at 12:11 am

Let’s face it, social search is where things are heading, away from the original link driven algorithm towards a more user representative and interactive model. Tapping into this is key towards attaining the goal of continued success.

midhat louis | May 8th, 2009 at 11:28 am

Ohhhhh that maybe good