Yahoo has wisely recognized that the future viability of the Yahoo world relies on getting lots and lots of developers to create apps for it. And what they are doing to encourage that practice is to create a common development environment so that an individual application can be created for one world of Yahoo that can be easily migrated to another.
In his speech, Balogh mentioned the idea of an app that seamlessly imported Yelp reviews into any area of Yahoo, so that the consumer could get ratings of places, things, and events that enrich her experience wherever she is on Yahoo. This will have tremendous value.
Yahoo promises to create a very simple and intuitive application platform.
A keystone of this YOS effort for developers is the uniting of all of a person’s profiles into one, so that information available in one area of Yahoo can be leveraged in another. They say that the consumer will be able to choose to what extent he wishes to share that information with applications, which is a good thing. Since FaceBook has already gotten us very used to letting it all hang out online, I don’t believe this will be much of a barrier.
Yahoo is already part of Google’s Open Social, which is also a wise move. There is no reason to create another proprietary standard – it’s the last thing a company that needs developer collaboration should do.
The question to me is whether Yahoo can create new Yahoo environments that enable this sort of application environment without disrupting the experiences its users already like about the site. I for one dislike the new Yahoo Mail, which is essentially the Outlooking of Yahoo Mail.
Only time will tell. But it’ll be an interesting watch.
Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to write.
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