Yahoo just opened its doors to a bunch of new OpenSocial apps. People who use MyYahoo as a startpage can now add apps from Mint, KaChing, WordPress, and more. The apps include a small view which appear on your MyYahoo page, but can also open up into a canvas view (which is essentially a dedicated page on Yahoo for that particular app). The Mint app, for instance, gives you a dashboard view of your finances and alerts. The WordPress app lets you do a quick post to your blog right from Yahoo. All together, Yahoo added 14 new apps for users to choose from. You can check your meds (Drugs.com), gas prices (GasBuddy), fantasy stock portfolio (kaChing), food and wine pairings (MyRecipes + Snooth), share books (WeRead), or just play Flood-It (LabPixies). You gotta add Flood-It, love that game.
The underlying apps will benefit from getting extra exposure on MyYahoo, but it won’t drive much traffic to their sites. People who want to go deeper into the apps will simply open up a canvas page, much like they do on Facebook. But that is okay, because it shouldn’t really matter where your users interact with your service. For Yahoo, this is yet another step in its effort to be the starting point on the Web for its users. The nice thing about the OpenSocial apps is that users don’t have to leave Yahoo to engage with them. So it is really Yahoo’s way of remaining a destination site and keeping its users within its walls, even if they are using non-Yahoo services. Today, Yahoo is also bringing some new add-ons into Yahoo! Mail, including PayPal and Picnik. And Yahoo! TV (which is built into some Samsung and LG TVs) now lets you watch YouTube videos.
The apps are built on top of the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP). The canvas views at least support OpenSocial, but app developers still have to tweak the apps to make them Yahoo-friendly. For instance, the “small view” (i.e. the widgets which actually appear on the MyYahoo page) must be developed using “Yahoo! Markup Language” (YML), which is an extension of HTML with more bells and whistles. Yahoo is trying to bring together YML and the OpenSocial Markup Language (OSML), but right now they are forked. But turning an OpenSocial app into one that works inside Yahoo is getting easier. Yahoo joined OpenSocial last year. No word yet on when MyYahoo will start supporting Facebook apps. Oh right, cause that’s never gonna happen.
Let me get this right. Are you saying that these apps (or YAPs) will not work in other OpenSocial containers like Orkut and LinkedIn? Is so, what exactly is the point of OpenSocial?
They will with some tweaking. There’s OpenSocial the ideal, and OpenSocial the reality.
whos tweaking the comments?
I find these opensocial apps to be bad user experiences. You get a 3 second delay each time you click a page where you are shown a white screen, then you get another second delay as half the content shows with a scrollbar then the content finally expands down.
so sad for yahoo, they got stuck holding the opensocial bag on their utterly pointless “yos” project while google has leapfrogged into wave.
while wave also supports opensocial, no one will care. opensocial is dead.
good way of putting it. but open social aint dead. far from it. it’s maturing at healthy, not just full of hype, pace.
Sad, I was sooo excited about opensocial about 2 years ago… It just never happened
As James noted. OpenSocial is here! You just have to use it.
Take a look at MySpace etc.. Leave aside the quality of service currently provided, but it’s all there. You can get the friends, network, etc..
Other examples are Yahoo, who are always pioneering in this space.
For a complete list:
http://wiki.ope...ner_Information
Even LinkedIn got some stuff, though I am not sure who exactly you have to bribe or sleep with to gain access to their precious APIs. There’s not even a “no” or anything, maybe just poor customer service.
that’s not true. Google’s doing some very serious stuff with google friend connect, and user profiles connected to your gmail account, and google reader connected to it all with your friends list. Open Social is clandestinely becoming the super google social network before people’s eyes without them knowing it. Go to Chris Lang’s GooglingSocial.com to learn more.
can you submit an app? Im not seeing anywhere to do that
Here is the entry point
https://develop....com/dashboard/
No mention of Nozbe – the Productivity “getting things done app” that also joined MyYahoo as an Open app and is the first to-do list to do so.
When you click on “Add content” in My Yahoo and click on “Open Apps” the first 6 contain “Mint” and the next 6 contain “Nozbe” as well.
Sorry for this self-promo rant, but I thought Techcrunch would also mention a non-Silicon-Valley app in the 14 apps that joined the club.
Actually I think Nozbe is the first European app that was invited to join the YAP platform. Maybe Techcrunch Europe will cover that then?
Snooth is non Silicon Valley – they are based in New York
We’ve also added Wrike Simple Projects to My Yahoo! It’s the first team productivity application on this platform. If you have any feedback on this tool, you’re welcome to share it with us.