Yahoo! Open Strategy (YOS) Unveiled
It’s very gratifying to at last be able to talk publicly about YOS, Yahoo’s strategy for opening itself to 3rd-party developers across many of its properties and tools.
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!
