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| Yahoo! Open Strategy Could Help Save Yahoo!, Change Web as We Know It by Karsten Weide, IDC On April 24, 2008, Yahoo! CTO Ari Balogh unveiled Yahoo! Open Strategy at Web 2.0 in San Francisco. Yahoo! Open Strategy (or Yahoo! OS for short) is nothing less but the plan to open up the entirety of Yahoo! as a platform to external developers, similar to what Facebook has done. With Yahoo! OS, the company unveiled both its new long-term strategy and that strategy's most important component. The company had previously announced other "open" initiatives, but none that would have come close to Yahoo! OS in terms of the sweeping consequences it might have (those announcements included the ad platform Yahoo! AMP, opening up Yahoo!'s mobile platform Yahoo! Go, and Yahoo! Open Search). In short, Yahoo! OS' idea is that opening up Yahoo! will attract many externally developed applications that will run on it, and that this will also enable social networking functionality across all of Yahoo!'s services. The hope is that the above will combine to increase audience reach, traffic, advertising inventory, and, consequently, advertising revenue growth. IDC believes Yahoo! OS, if it became reality, could help the company to become a viable competitor for Google once again in the long term. It could also, due to this prospect, bolster the defense against Microsoft's current attempt to take over the company. Yahoo! OS is based on re-wiring the software on which Yahoo! runs. Yahoo! today is a collection of largely disparate products. With Yahoo! OS, they would be moved onto a single, unified platform. This platform would have a defined set of APIs allowing applications to use common services and data sources, and would open up applications to be accessed by other applications. The open access to data would extend to data on users also, including user profiles and social relations. That way applications would be enabled to harness the social graph. Leveraging these technological underpinnings, Yahoo! Open Strategy would unfold in three steps: - Open Yahoo! internally: Each of its products and services will be able to use each other's functionalities and data. - Open Yahoo! externally: Third-party developers will be able to code applications that run on Yahoo!, can access certain user data and thereby extend Yahoo!'s utility. - Open Yahoo! everywhere: Any external service will be able to include certain Yahoo! functionalities into their own services. Yahoo! OS could enormously benefit the company. To begin with, Yahoo! OS could be used to create a truly powerful and dynamic social network for users. Rather than to rely on manually established links between users, it could for instance draw on instant messaging (IM) and email exchanges to determine how close and important any given person is to a user. IM contacts are the most intimate ones, then email contacts… the more often you communicate with someone on IM or mail, the closer that person must be to you. Such a social network would be much more elegant, dynamic, easy to use, and powerful than anything that is out there currently. It could socially empower any number of applications: social news feeds keeping one up to date on friends and family, photo, video and music sharing, calendaring, news selection, search results optimization, product recommendations, online gaming, SaaS productivity app collaboration, job hunting, finding professional contacts… the list goes on and on and on. Essentially, Yahoo! OS could turn Yahoo! into one giant social networking service (SNS) – but one, as opposed to services such as MySpace and Facebook, that actually delivers on what an SNS is supposed to do: to facilitate social relations, automatically keep track of connections, allow for any sort of communication, allow collaboration. By becoming more useful, Yahoo! would attract more users and would be more likely to retain them. The users themselves would spend more time on the service and would also generate more page views. Where other Web sites incorporate Yahoo! functionality and content, it would extend Yahoo!'s reach and traffic even more. It is easy to see how Yahoo! OS could help to accelerate Yahoo!'s revenue growth. Yahoo! could increase its audience reach, grow its advertising inventory, and could offer advertisers the eyeballs of users who are more engaged. It could also leverage data on users' social relations and their online behavior to better target ads, promising a better return on investment for advertisers' marketing dollars. Beyond revenue, if Yahoo! OS succeeded, it would also set an example for openness on the Web at large. It would demonstrate that the future of social networking should be functionality that is ubiquitous, and integral part of any Web product and service. True, Facebook has done it before Yahoo!. But Facebook is only Facebook. Yahoo! is the new media company with the most complete product portfolio on the Web and the greatest audience reach. All of the above would give Yahoo! much-needed street cred, helping it to reclaim thought leadership, regain its cool, and reinvigorate its brand. All in all, Yahoo! OS, together with Yahoo!'s other "open" initiatives, spells out a clear, bold, visionary strategy that could very well help Yahoo! to come around. But how real is it? Because to be clear, the Yahoo! OS and the company's other announcements are for the most part just that: announcements. Yahoo! certainly has the vision and the resources to carry out its new strategy, and its engineers are frantically working behind the scenes to turn Yahoo! OS into a reality as you read this. Yet there is a long way ahead of them. Yahoo! will only be able to realize its new "open" strategy if its stockholders can be convinced by it to not sell out to Microsoft. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: Only if stockholders believe in Yahoo! OS will it become reality. If they don't believe it, they will most likely sell to Microsoft. And under Microsoft, the future of Yahoo! OS is very much in doubt. write your comments about the article :: © 2008 Computing News :: home page |