Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Yahoo’s next plan to be more “Open and Social”

By now, you’ve probably heard about Yahoo!’s Open Strategy, but for most of you, this remains a fairly abstract concept that translates to a new look for your profile on Yahoo!.

Several of you have emailed or commented asking for an explanation of “Open and Social”-so here’s a quick top-line of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy:

Changing what’s under the hood: this is what’s driving the change to profiles. The old profiles system was outdated and not ready to support the capabilities required of a modern social site. We have also developed and deployed a completely new platform for identity and social capability across Yahoo! and the web.

Make it more “social:” For most of you, the term “social” means “social networking” and you instantly think of sites like Facebook and MySpace. At Yahoo!, we see social in a different way.

Yahoo’s CTO, Ari Balogh probably said it best: “This is about making Yahoo! social in every dimension. Social is not a destination — it’s a dimension and it will infuse all aspects of a consumer’s experience on the Web.”

Instead of going to a specific social networking page, social at Yahoo! means taking your activity and identity with you. This means that when you leave a comment on Buzz, Local, or even third party sites (after you grant them permission, of course), your activity can be shared on many of the Yahoo! “starting points”, such as Mail or the home page. This means that you don’t have to visit a specific website to keep up to date on your friends and their activities.

Open it up: A while back Jerry Yang demonstrated the new look for Yahoo! Mail at CES, which includes opening up Mail to developers. What this means for you as a user is more functionality, more features, and more customization. This is enabled by the YOS platform, which allows developers to integrate with and extend key parts of Yahoo!, including Mail, MyYahoo, and others. Check out the Mail demo from CES and the recap over at the Mail blog, here.

All of this means that you will be able to enjoy more social versions of your favorite Yahoo! services and add new features to those services by using 3rd-party applications enabled by the Yahoo Open Strategy.

Your new profile is at the center of many of these social experiences. Adding Connections from your profile will allow you to share and stay in touch with the key people in your life as you and they use Yahoo! every day.

There’s still a lot of work to be done to make these features a reality across Yahoo!, so be on the look out for new versions of several Yahoo! services. Please continue to share your constructive feedback with us, as we know the only way for us to improve these services is with your help.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

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