I love participating in events revolving around startups and funding, and this one promises to be exceptional, given an active group of VC’s and entrepreneurs from around the region, and a region I think is really enjoying a startup culture growth spurt from Boulder to Missoula. The format is one day of startup company presentations interspersed with talks from Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, HP, and others, bookended by socializing and networking evenings.

OK, I’m sure the setting won’t be bad either, though I have a bit of a dilemma in that my cold weather and flyfishing gear won’t fit in the same weekend bag. Oh well, I guess I’ll be cold!

If you’re in the area – or even just interested – come check it out.

Developers can build against it on a self-serve basis (no BD deal needed for basic use), enabling users to import their address books or pieces of data from it. We also have a sync interface for approved partners. Access is via bbAuth, enhancing user security (and will likely be via oAuth at some point in the future).

The key news here is Yahoo! is making this data freely available, on the assumption that it’s the users’ data – not Yahoo!’s. As you look at this alongside the openness of some of our other social API’s (e.g. MyBlogLog), there’s a consistent theme here in that Yahoo! is not trying to “own” this data, but is rather following the O’Reilly maxim of creating more value than we collect — and letting that value inure to users and the developers building stuff for them.

Watch this space — you’ll be seeing more of that theme.

It’s one of the highlights of my job that I get to meet with a lot of startups, developers, VC’s, and industry bloggers (species that are often cross-bred). Many become my conference and cocktail-party familiars, twitter and facebook friends, idea collaborators, daily RSS reads, and even sometimes real friends. Many, of course, do not, but in the course of an average week I connect with dozens of people, a bunch of whom I can dialog usefully with vis-a-vis my job, and many of whom I end up connecting to other parts of Yahoo! Often enough, I connect people to other 3rd-party companies.

Today’s environment is transparent, open, and conversational – meaning almost anyone can get to anyone and communicate with them publicly, semi-publicly, or privately. This is great – when I need to find someone, it tends to be quite easy to reach them directly or with one degree of separation via my network. When someone needs to reach me, I am equally easy to find (and in fact have a public “contact me” email link that’s one click away from a search on my name). As conversations become substantive, companies are increasingly transparent about their objectives, plans, competition, and even finances, all of which materially increase effectiveness.

So much for the good stuff. The challenges are: a) that I’m still under the constraints of a public company, and can not in any way be “conversational” about material inside information; and b) that open doors like mine are magnets for everything from unrelated BU inquiries (from people who should know better) to “the Yahoo! suggestion box”, and the signal-to-noise ratio of inbound items can create a lot of distractions and confusion if I don’t filter aggressively.

We could deal with the first issue the way public companies often do (wait until release and then sic our sales “BD” people on you), but I and many of my colleagues try to operate in the more open mode when we can. In these meetings, we share what we can publicly, are open about our constraints, and sometimes put companies under NDA to discuss more details. Often, however, we do not. People – especially, it seems, web2 types who believe all information should be free — tend to be careless, forgetful, sloppy, and sometimes overtly insubordinate to confidentiality restrictions on information shared under NDA. (Recently, for example, I revealed product plans under NDA, and the recipient not only told a Wired reporter, but introduced me for on-the-record comment!)

In general, I’d rather have a non-confidential conversation anyway. So, we often skip the NDA, we tell you what we can, and we trust that you can deal with the fact there’s information we can’t tell you. If we’re operating in an area close to a given company that we’re talking to, I’ll take pains to make everyone aware of the potential for conflict.

Very often, these kinds of meetings are at our request. Equally often, they’re at the company’s request (or their investors’). Any company that’s been around more than a few cycles will likely have knocked on many doors, been pinged by multiple groups, maybe engaged with corp dev, had their investors tee up various VP’s, etc., trying to push a deal or with a very thinly veiled hope we will acquire them. Very occasionally, these kinds of meetings do lead to immediate deals or m&a conversations, but usually not, and we often can’t say too much more than “interesting, thanks” or “please circle back to us next quarter” or “we’ll engage with you when we’re closer to release”.

Sometimes, we’d really like to say more – about the product fit, about where we see the market going, about ideas that for Yahoo! that cascade from your demo. Or there might be a natural deal that’s two quarters away. Other times, we might find your idea fantastic in the abstract, but don’t see an obvious way plug it into our roadmaps meaningfully given technology / strategy / personnel and any number of other issues. But we often find ourselves in the situation where can’t tell you why or share ideas that reveal our specific plans.

Sometimes people find this frustrating (as Jeff apparently does). Especially once you’ve made the rounds a few times, or as the organization changes over time, this is understandable. But as much as I love newsgator (loyal user, comment on their blog, almost went to work there, etc.), Yahoo! still doesn’t have a product that’s ready-made for an RSS aggregating enterprise media widget and attention data distribution platform. That I can disclose. Yet. (Sorry!)

Particularly when you are solving market problems in a new way, you might not get the response you are looking for on the first (or even nth) visit. Your six-month attempt to sell Yahoo! your solution might not effectively land you on a roadmap that was planned 18 months out. But I would appreciate it if you did not slam me and my colleagues for not saying enough at a meeting, or for not offering a deal to your satisfaction on the spot. That’s how the world works; deal with it or don’t come.

(I would also appreciate it if you would not expect a mid-level manager on my team to provide a substantive comment on the MSFT situation. Does he look like a PR spokesperson or Yahoo! board member? It’s a PUBLIC COMPANY; what do you think we’re going to say in a BD meeting?)

Additionally, it would be nice if the beneficiaries of all these open doors at Yahoo! did not abuse them to end-around deals they’ve been unable to do directly. Or trash us for not being coordinated enough when we hand these end-arounds right back to the BU owners. Or comment negatively about Yahoo’s lack of collaborative culture when we refuse to give out the cell-phone numbers of our colleagues.

Every once in a while, when I’m burned by one of these frustrated or abusive would-be partners, I regret being as available as I am. I guess today’s version of one of my father’s favorite maxims is, “no good deed goes unpublished”. But I know I’ll be greeted with another fantastic or inventive startup tomorrow, and I’m reminded of why I love what I do.

The more interesting alternative to irritable demands and cranky blog posts, of course, is to appreciate the entrepreneurial nature of Yahoo and the people who work there. To know that we are as keen as you to create new and innovative products.  To work with us, using the BD opportunity to build relationships and surface potential solutions. To demonstrate disruptive solutions that help us challenge orthodox ways of thinking about Yahoo! products. To enable us to drive orthogonal intersections across internal channels, even if it means multiple meetings and engagement points. To light a collective fire under any signs of “not invented here” roadmaps.

I’ve always thought that’s what strategic partnerships were all about — it’s certainly what interests me. Believe me, there are lots of people at Yahoo! who are hungry for and receptive to this approach.

So, if the chance to pitch an emerging media solution to a 600-newspaper consortium while they’re in build mode, or to engage the world’s most popular start page in a conversation about your widgets in the run-up to YOS is the kind of opportunity that appeals to you, then we’d love to hear from you.

Again.

Dozens of the most talented people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with have been involved in envisioning, setting strategy for, roadmapping, developing, and rolling out the many elements of this project (and hundreds behind the scenes). It’s by far the most ambitious product initiative I’ve ever been a part of, and it’s been really fun to watch (and help) the entire company align around this — for all the potshots people take at Yahoo!, it really is an incredible market force when it gets fully behind something like this. It’s been even more fun to watch my talented product, design, and engineering colleagues get it built.

In case you weren’t following the detailed announcement at Web2.0, we announced a robust developer application platform offering distribution across many Yahoo properties and views, a suite of social API’s, and a broad initiative to wire “social” into the user experience across the entire company. Of course it’s OpenSocial compliant, as we hinted at in announcing our partnership to develop a foundation around that standard.

I recommend watching this video of Ari Balogh (Y’s CTO) and reading this YDN post if you would like to know more. Only SearchMonkey is live (signup link) so far, but there’s much more coming, and the train is gathering steam.

So stay tuned, and stay in touch if you want to be part of it!

OpenSocial is already in the open in the sense that it’s available for use by anyone, and has been since it first came out last November. The spec is published with a Creative Commons license, and there’s reference code put out under an Apache open-source license. There’s been lots of community collaboration on it, and Google has been a good custodian in bringing it this far along.

What putting it in a foundation does is ensure access to the future direction of the spec is open to everyone, and create a way for contributions to be protected from patent lawsuits and IP contamination (for people and companies that have to worry about those arcane but very real kinds of impediment to intellectual collaboration). Most importantly, it means application developers, containers, and would-be contributors alike can take a bet on this technology with the benefit of knowing it’s free (as in beer, and as in speech) forever, that a community of developers is out there building on it, and that they won’t get box-canyoned into proprietary code.

OpenSocial itself still has plenty of maturing to do, but millions of users of twitter, facebook and even old-skool social apps like evite know how great application experiences that tap into your social network can be. Now OpenSocial has every chance to become the Wordpress of social app platforms and yield a similarly rich ecosystem of innovation around it. Kudos to Google here – helping OpenSocial take root by putting it out in the open isn’t just a smart thing to do (even though it means giving up “ownership” of it); it’s the right thing to do.
Helping close this deal for Yahoo! has been a great experience for me personally, too. In addition to helping Yahoo! walk the talk, having a lot of fun, and learning more than I ever thought I would about patent non-assertion, I’ve also gotten to know a very smart and passionate bunch of people at Google, MySpace, and my own employer during this.

So I guess now that it’s public, it’s time to join Orkut and add some new folks to my MySpace, LinkedIn, and Plaxo networks – I’m sure they’ll be inviting me to join causes, share restaurant reviews, and throw monkeys soon!

UPDATE: Blog posts are starting to come in. You probably know where to find them, but I particularly like this quote from CNET: “It’s like the Justice League of social media”!

It’s a project I’ve been supporting out of Brickhouse, and the team that’s been developing it has been working incredibly hard to get it ready for launch. I’m delighted to see the eagle fly — and even more eager to see what developers and users make of it.

If you’d like a beta invitation, drop me a line — now you know where to find me.

I’m glad this week is over.

When I first joined St. Martin’s Press in 1994, it was as the editorial assistant to a guy named Tom McCormack (whose Wikipedia entry really deserves attention). A quirky, opinionated character, muscular creative judgment, an actor’s command, and a sharp’s ability to cover the angles don’t often arrive in a single package, but when they do, look out. Most everyone I knew either revered Tom or reviled him (and occasionally both), but nobody failed to appreciate him — or the $100+ million publishing house that still ran like a family affair and somehow managed to wring profit out of the unlikeliest books.

Tom was a mentor in the truest sense of the word, alternately encouraging and scolding to the verge of tears younglings of various vintages before me, but ultimately jabbing his cuban cigar at the door and sending them off to beat a sure path to success. I was last off the line (and I’ll keep you posted about the other bit); knowing early on that I would witness an interesting transition if I stuck around long enough, I was not disappointed when Macmillan, the parent company, was sold to the Holtzbrinck conglomerate a few years later.

Ideas clash and things change; hypercompetent individuals rebel at the idea of process; cults of literary personality give way to MBA’s. . . but the main thing is the culture and those charged with its clarity. Either a leader can embrace the tonic change, and the management has the stomach to handle the hangover and convene the new day at the old table, or politicians and bureaucrats prevail. At St. Martin’s, I had a front-row seat, was given a chance, and took my medicine (running a line of travel books, mostly figuring it out as I went). The house’s success after Tom left speaks for itself, a testament to the talent he groomed and the successor he seated firmly at the table’s head — the most abiding of the lessons I was left to ponder on his retirement.

As for Yahoo!, I’m similarly thrilled to be a witness to this changing of the guard. Reorgs have their un-fun parts, but change like this at companies as interesting and important as Yahoo! is right now don’t happen very often. Once again, I’m sitting in a pretty interesting spot.

History — and the shareholders and employees of a $40 billion company — will judge the new CEO with a much harsher lens than Jerry Yang ever put himself under as a Founder or as “Chief Yahoo!”. Yahoo! is in a good position to continue its success, but realizing its true potential depends on whether the new guy “gets it” when it comes to recognizing the issues and the opportunities, has the DNA and the creative vision to know what to do, and has the balls and the stamina and the sheer will to make it happen.

For that job description, I can’t think of a more inspired choice.