Back in April, we rolled out our vision for a more open Yahoo! — with “open” defined as rewiring Yahoo! so we could 1) open our network to outside innovation, 2) unlock the power of your social relationships, and 3) mesh your Yahoo! experience with other sites to bring you the best of the Web.

Today that vision takes another important step forward. We’re officially cutting the ribbon for talented developers everywhere, who are now welcome to come in and access our tools and data so they can build applications for a more customized, social, and relevant Yahoo! network and beyond.

I won’t bore you with the plumbing — you can head over to our developer network for those details — but let me summarize the potential impact on you the user as developers dig in and begin to build their applications.

Most obvious will be the social aspects. At a high level, we’re rolling out a social platform that will draw on the hundreds of millions of connections on Yahoo! – everything from random encounters with someone who commented on the same photo as you, to deep connections you have with friends who know nearly everything about you. 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. Most importantly, by enabling developers to make your social connections specific to the Yahoo! service you’re using, we believe you’ll enjoy some incredibly unique and creative new experiences that we would never have thought of.

There’s really no limit to the potential, but here are a few examples:

• Share updates and discover new things online: You’ll be able to see what your friends are doing on Yahoo! (like entering ratings on Yahoo! Movies or buzzing articles on Yahoo! Buzz) and off our network (like the blog post they just commented on, photo they’ve uploaded, movie they’ve rented, or the restaurant they just reviewed). And on the flip side, you can share your activities with them, helping them stay in touch with you more easily. Basically, we’re letting developers centralize anything you do on the Web as an update on our platform — with your explicit permission, of course. And it will be that much easier to discover great new things through the people and relationships most relevant to you. (Who knew that Uncle Jim loved “When Harry Met Sally” so much?) And publishers love this because they get exposed to more visitors whose friends implicitly recommend their content.
• A universal profile: We’ve begun the process of consolidating everyone’s Yahoo! experience onto a new, single profile so that everyone has a control panel — a central place where they can manage the new “open” applications that they decide to use and the social connections they have across Yahoo!.
• Make your Address Book truly portable: You can make your address book available to an online merchant so you can more easily ship friends a gift, or be reminded when it’s time to send them an online birthday card. Even beyond the Address Book, 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.
• Customize Yahoo! like never before: Want to track your eBay auction? Is CNN your favorite news outlet? What’s next in your Netflix queue? Pull them all into the Yahoo! homepage so you can see everything that’s important to you in one place. We’ll open select properties like My Yahoo!, Mail and our front page so that you can let third-party applications become part of those sites as you see fit.
• Find and connect with new people: Based on whom you already know and interact with — on Yahoo! and off — we’ll make suggestions for more people to add to your social circle. And we’ll help you prioritize all of your connections, particularly as they communicate with you in Yahoo! Mail.

We’ve done all of this in a way that keeps Yahoo! as safe and secure as ever, while also building in full privacy and permission control so you’ll have complete control over things like what you broadcast publicly and what information you share with third-party sites, etc.

As of today, developers can start using our newly available data on their own web sites and even start deploying new applications into Yahoo!. You won’t find these externally developed applications built into your favorite Yahoo! service just yet — that’s coming soon. But starting today, you could discover new apps either by invitation from a friend or by noticing via your Profile or Messenger updates feed that a connection is using the app.

Reaching this step in our Yahoo! Open Strategy has been a significant effort, requiring hundreds of developers in offices around the world. We’ve even worked hand-in-hand with Google, MySpace, and many other of our traditional competitors as partners in this effort. We mean it when we say we’re open!

Like any initiative that thrives on the ingenuity of third party developers, we expect our open platforms to evolve and improve based on their feedback. This is very much an initial release. But we’re anxious to see what developers out there have up their sleeves and what you’ll do with it.

Jay Rossiter
Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Open Strategy