In the eve of Yahoo! Open hack day!

By Jayakishore Bayadi
Thursday, 11, September, Sunnyvale, CA

Yahoo! Announced its this year’s edition of Open hack day this morning. In a press conference Ari Balogh, CTO at Yahoo! invited talented developers to take advantage of Yahoo! Platform to experience a hockey stick kind of turn around in their work they do, i.e., developing applications!

It’s some thing like this. If you are a developer with a dream to impact an insane number of people with your work and don’t want to start small, dazzling only a few bunch of people with your incredible codes, then Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) should be a perfect platform for you. It’s a cool and one of the most happening event where you can write code that will meaningfully reach millions of users in a single bound. That’s the promise of an open Yahoo!. You can write applications that build on existing Yahoo! applications like Yahoo! Mail, Sports, Search, our front page, mobile, My Yahoo!, etc. to tap into millions of loyal users, and make Internet experience more relevant and useful.

Today more than 500 million users use Yahoo! Services every month. They serve 120 billion page views per month. They spend 235 billion minutes a month on Yahoo! sites. Importantly, some 10 billion relationships exist on user buddy lists and in Yahoo! address books. All that represents a mind-boggling audience for developers.

Says Balogh,“We are in the process of rewiring Yahoo!, building platforms that fundamentally change how Yahoo! works." For instance, future Yahoo! Search will not be just 'content' search, but it will be 'intent' search. "Instead of giving just web links to the related search item, next wave would be understanding the needs of the user and delivering the content exactly what he wants, explains "Prabhakar Raghavan, Head, Yahoo! Research. Perhaps, artificial Intelligence(AI) should be the mantra behind this as every body is after that technology nowadays.

Back to Yahoo!’s open strategy. Being "open" is buzzword these days with lots of Internet companies are on the “open” bandwagon. “Open is not only our strategy, it’s necessity in mobility because of its complexity,” says Marco Boerries, Executive VP at Yahoo!. And with the bandwagon is getting pretty crowded, it seems that Yahoo! has been in the “open” camp for years, starting simple with RSS feeds in 2003. And now, Yahoo! claims that Flickr is the second-most popular API on the Web. And the company is leading the industry’s efforts to embrace open development.

A first taste of Yahoo!’s strategy was SearchMonkey, which lets developers mash up helpful data with their search engine results. A Japanese restaurant would no longer be a simple link. Instead, it could include a photo, address, ratings, reviews, and links to online reservations. Now, Search Monkey available and already attracting bunch of users across the globe.

And it doesn’t stop there. Y!OS will let developers make Yahoo! portable so that everywhere you go, a more relevant, social and useful online experience is available to you. Shopping on a third-party site, Web on your TV (TV widgets), Yahoo! One Search, mobile sites exclusively for mobiles with faster…beautiful experience… powerful features and many more applications in the pipeline. Just wait and watch there’s plenty more to come in the months ahead!

That’s why, though it looks like following in the footsteps of Facebook, Google, Y!OS is basically the rewiring of Yahoo, which would make perhaps make the consumer experience more social. Well, with Google’s friend list growing, Yahoo! should go social before it is too late right?
(source:Siliconindia)



It's me@Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA, USA