YOS - YAHOO'S SOCIAL INITIATIVE

Those who know me know that I am Yahoo’s biggest cheerleader, so let that be your preface to this post. I adore Yahoo. I prefer its search. I like the home page. They got me started with RSS. They house my pics on Flickr. IU have had a Yahoo email account for nine years and despite the thousands of times I have registered for things online, I got only one piece of spam last week.

I am not alone. Yahoo gets 600 Million unique visitors globally per month. 350 Million are profiled users. 120 Billion monthly page views. And also critical: over 200,000 developers working with them globally.

At last week’s Web 2.0 conference, Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh discussed “YOS”, the “Yahoo Open Strategy” designed to keep the site relevant and central to the web experience of its users as we careen into a totally 2.0 World. I like Balogh’s ability to explain extremely complex technical stuff in terms that even I can understand.

If the three tenets of Yahoo are, as Balogh defined:

1. Being the World’s Start Up Page


2. Being the Advertiser Must-Buy


3. Openness for Consumers and Developers

It quickly becomes apparent that major steps need to be taken now for Yahoo to remain the world’s traffic leader.

Consider: Yahoo Mail is number one, but with billions of messages now being sent through proprietary social platforms on MySpace, Facebook, even XBOX Live, it’s clear that social functionality needs to be added to stay relevant.

Consider: People’s expectations of convenience have risen to such an extent that soon (or perhaps already) it will be unrealistic for people to be expected to…say…read an email that references a location and then go to Yahoo Maps to find it. They want things all together.

Consider: Context is a critical consideration in social. The people closest to me for work are different than those who are closest to me in my private life.

And addressing these and 397 other issues is what YOS is all about.

And can I reassure you that social in this context does NOT mean they are creating ANOTHER social network. They PROMISE it doesn’t. And thank the Heavens for that.

The initiatives revolve around three core ideas:

1. A new open application platform that provides a common set of tools for developing apps that work in all Yahoo environments.


2. A New All Encompassing Social Environment. Yahoo will unify ALL profiles throughout Yahoo to make things easier and more customizable for the consumer.


3. Initiative to rewire properties to create an overarching social experience and allow open APIs in a consistent way across all Yahoo properties and environments.

In the next several days I will be looking at each of these individually and what they mean for the future of Yahoo. Who knows, I may get you to stop using that pesky Google Search and really start finding things on the first query!

TOMORROW: THE NEW YOS APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM (FOR DINGBATS)