Yahoo! Opens Floodgates On Homepage To Devs 49
alphadogg writes to mention that at their "Open Hack Day" conference today and tomorrow, Yahoo plans on opening the floodgates to their homepage in hopes that developers will start building massive numbers of applications for general distribution. "Announced in April 2008, YOS [Yahoo's Open Strategy] aims to open all of the company's online services, sites and applications to third-party developers, as well as give end users a 'social profile' dashboard to unify and manage their Yahoo services. Swinging wide open the doors of Yahoo.com to external developers is a big milestone in this ambitious effort. Until now, Yahoo has erred on the conservative side when it comes to allowing tightly-integrated applications for its home page, opting to work individually with hand-picked partners."
Yeah, wow... (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's a bit like the Facebook platform only less social, fewer eyes, and years late? I know that's being awfully critical, but c'mon... Yahoo! has had the day-late, dollar-short affliction for a long time now.
yahoo home site (Score:3, Insightful)
If i can make the home page look more like a search engine and less like all the cable news sites (full of crap) then maybe i will actually try their service out.
getting bored (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope you are karma whoring with such lame post which is guaranteed (somehow) to get "score".
Do you have a clue about the real web, the web companies/people really care about? Check table 3 at http://ir.comscore.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=366591 [comscore.com] . You will see Yahoo is still around, at second place after Google with 146 freaking million unique visitors. Can you render that number in your brain? 146 million unique visitors on Yahoo properties and they open their main property to developers.
Do you think MS was joking when they tried to buy them for 44.6 billion dollars? Grow up really...
Re:Wait, Yahoo!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Japan uses Yahoo. Massively. In fact it wasn't that long ago that I would get blank stares from people when mentioning google, and having to substitute yahoo instead... more recently people at least know what you are talking about, even if they aren't using it. Part of the reason for this is that they achieved huge brand recognition (if not much profit) when their subsidiary company Yahoo!Broadband did a pretty massive campaign to gain subscribers, giving away routers outside train stations, offering free three month connections and so on. (They are also tied into Softbank, one of the larger mobile phone companies here.)
E-bay is another pretty unheard of site, while Yahoo! auctions alone would probably keep the company afloat on its own over here. They are heavily used as a portal site and the usual first stop for people wanting to buy plane tickets or check the weather. For many people I think Yahoo is actually thought of as "the internet" and don't seem likely to go anywhere soon...