The New Yahoo: Sticky, Viral, And Most Of All, Friendly
Yahoo's CTO Ari Balogh and Chief Architect (Platforms) Neal Sample filled in a few more details today around their new Yahoo Open Strategy (called YOS internally). — Background — Yahoo wants to turn itself …
Context & Ripple Effects
Yahoo is putting operational detail behind an openness agenda signaled by its 2007 open invitation and its February open approach to search. The immediate backdrop is SearchMonkey's private beta, which gives Yahoo a named developer platform alongside the broader Yahoo Open Strategy.
The significance is strategic rather than a single product launch: Ari Balogh and Neal Sample are defining YOS as a way for Yahoo to make its properties more participatory and developer-facing.
First-order effects
- Yahoo's platform teams must translate YOS into developer-facing capabilities, with SearchMonkey's private beta serving as an immediate test of whether outside development can extend Yahoo search.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo's search strategy becomes more dependent on attracting developer participation and useful extensions, rather than relying solely on Yahoo-built features.
Third-order effects
- If Yahoo applies the same open-strategy model across its properties, portal differentiation shifts toward the platform's ability to attract outside contributions and social distribution.
The trend: Yahoo is moving from a self-contained portal model toward an open platform model in which developer participation is part of product strategy.