Yahoo ! Open Strategy launch

On Tuesday Yahoo ! launched its Open Strategy, exposing Yahoo ! account data and social connections to third-party developers. Yahoo ! Open Strategy is the third pillar of faith announced by CEO Jerry Yang last year during the company’s rebirth. Y !OS is the new glue connecting the next versions of Yahoo !’s own properties and will eventually power more relevant advertising across the network. In this post I will provide an overview of the new Yahoo ! services and its impact on both Yahoo ! and third-party developers. Yahoo ! Open Strategy is one of the keynote presentations at Widget Summit next week.

The Yahoo ! Open Strategy first and foremost unites Yahoo !’s own product fiefdoms into a common set of interchangeable components. The new platform ties together social features and rich content units across Yahoo ! properties in much the same way as YUI abstracts a common set of JavaScript and CSS interactions across Yahoo !. The company announced plans to integrate the Y !OS platform into a new version of My Yahoo ! and Yahoo ! Mail over the next year.

Yahoo !, like many portals, receives most of its user activity from mail and IM networks. These are the explicit social networks, tracking who we communicate with every day and at what frequency. Yahoo ! Mail, Yahoo ! Messenger, and Yahoo ! Mail represent some of the largest front-doors on the Web across a very international audience. Yahoo ! is building upon these established strong relationships to construct a social platform receiving new, relevant inputs every day. Y !OS is a partial answer to Yahoo !’s build vs. buy decision it faced in September 2006 when Yahoo ! reportedly offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion (about $400 million at today’s share price).