Six months after first announcing its open strategy, Yahoo has released a slew of development tools (as we told you it would) under the Y!OS 1.0 platform. It’s kind of like a Web OS, but Y!OS officially stands for Yahoo Open Strategy.
As part of its strategy to remain one of the most popular starting points on the Web, Yahoo is making it much easier for data, content, and applications to flow in and out of Yahoo. It is also adding a layer of social awareness to everything it does. Yahoo’s Jay Rossiter explains in a blog post some of the things that the Y!OS will let people do. These include:
1. Access to your and your friends’ activity streams both on Yahoo and elsewhere on the Web.
2. A single, universal Yahoo profile.
3. A portable address book that you can take to other sites.
4. More customization features that let you bring content from other sites more easily into Yahoo.
5. Social networking features that help you connect to more people on Yahoo.
Specifically, the Y!OS consists of several developer components, which you can read more about on Yahoo’s developer blog or its developer network site. The components are Yahoo Social Platform (YSP), Yahoo Query Language (YQL), Yahoo Application Platform (YAP), and OAuth.
Let’s take these one at a time. The Yahoo Social Platform is a set of RESTful APIs for Profiles, Connections, Updates, Contacts and Status. These APIs enable developers to pull out information about users, their activity, and their contacts from Yahoo and use it elsewhere on the web.
The Yahoo Query Language is a web service that functions much like SQL and creates a common interface for accessing data from both Yahoo and across the Web. It’s described as “a command line version of Pipes” since it simplifies the process of mashing up data from Yahoo and elsewhere.
The Yahoo Application Platform allows Open Social-based apps to be built and distributed across Yahoo’s own pages (MyYahoo, Yahoo Mail, category pages, etc). For now, apps on this platform can only be created in a restricted sandbox. But in the coming months, Yahoo will begin opening up its various properties for the integration of applications.
Finally, OAuth is the authentication and authorization standard Yahoo has decided to use when giving third parties access to Yahoo user data.
In addition to providing more tools for developers, the company continues to add social features throughout its existing products. Yahoo Mail users, for example, will soon be able to filter their inbound mail based on their most valuable contacts. Activity feeds that show your friends’ recent behavior will be added to places like Yahoo’s homepage and My Yahoo. And Yahoo will begin to distribute hooks into its updates system across its various properties, letting you indicate to your friends when you’ve undertaken an action on, say, Yahoo Buzz or News.
Learn more about Yahoo’s open strategy from our notes that we took at a briefing last week.
Looks like somehow promising move. It´s not Dataportability, but a step in the right direction.
I know Im kind of out here on my own with this…but to me this seems like a “me too” reactionary move – betting big on unproven, fashion-driven concepts. “Data Portability”, “Cloud Computing”, “Web 2.0″ – blah.
I have an idea – make your search engine better.
It’s been easy to criticize Yahoo (read: Yang) for a lot of the moves they’ve made in the last year, but with everyone’s cries for data portability you do have to love this move – at least as a consumer.
The only thing wrong Yahoo has been doing over the past year is not selling out to Microsoft and Icahn, which pisses TechCrunch (et al) off to no end. This colors the coverage when most of what you see is “FIRE YANG! SELL OUT! MAKE MY MS STOCK WORTH SOMETHING” with a smattering of “oh hey yahoo just released something cool.”
That’s it. No launch failures. No Twitterish outages. No rescinded TOSes. The YHOO bottom line is strong, their technology is good, they are popular, but a lot of people have Microsoft stock that Does. Not. Move. Year after year, so they pinned their hopes on Yahoo and got all mad when MS was spurned.
Techcrunch has no credibility on Yahoo stories. The only “easy to criticize” bit has been that Yahoo didn’t make a celebrity out of themselves, to the ire of Microsoft shareholders.
I’m excited about the opportunities this will bring, but I haven’t seen a clear monetization strategy for this or many other API moves. Traffic doesn’t always equate to money? Especially when people are using your site via API without even being aware of it.
Yahoo has definitely been most aggressive and a pioneer in the open standards and semantic search. This is just the iceberg – really really excited about this.
This reminds me of what Facebook is trying to do with FB Connect.
Goodluck & get outa the way Google!
Yahoo has been talking about this “universal profile system” ever since they revealed they were shutting down 360. The profile system was supposed to be out in the first quarter of 2008. Then Yahoo moved the 360 team to start working on Mash. Mash essentially a beta test for the new profile system technology and software. And then Yahoo finally rolled out the intially stages new profile system…with even less features and functionality than the buggy Mash and even buggier 360.
For now, I have to take anything that Yahoo says with a grain of salt about the size of a football. I’ll believe it when I see it.
This is a kick-ass strategy by yahoo. Thats why MSFT badly needs yahoo. Microsoft can’t compete with google without yahoo. Yahoo! is showing us new things and its on the way to regain “Darling of the Web” title.
This coupled with the continued work on BOSS could lead to some very fascinating stuff.
Very excited about YQL. The fact that Gnip is the first external partner certainly helps
Interesting!
Impressive, and a thoughtful review, too.
Maybe Jerry Yang is what you would think he is: a clumsy business person, but a good technical leader. I don’t know if Jerry Yang actually had anything to do with Yahoo’s technical direction, but it’s hard to imagine Yahoo’s taking steps like this under Terry Semel.
Has anyone thought that Yang might actually be purposely devaluing Yahoo! to make it completely open source once it’s been de-listed from nasdaq? Then he can buy the whole company on the cheap and go private. Maybe make it an open source foundation then he’ll have the whole world of developers to help make yahoo better. He is a co-founder and probably feels that stockholders have ruined the company. He may also believe that it’s the only way to really compete with google.
Just a thought.
who even goes to this site anymore?
Yeah it’s called Google code, anyway Yahoo is like that drunk friend that shows up late and looks all crazy and says whats wrong
They better sober up and get with the program.