It's incredibly gratifying to finally have something to point people at when they ask what I do at Yahoo.
Please keep the comments coming here and on the blog post. Feel free to message me if things don't work. If I can't answer your question, I'll be able to at least bug the person who can. Direct feedback is always the best.
This is a big win for Yahoo. I think they're realizing developers are their best chance to stay in the game, so they're opening up anything and everything in an attempt to hold on.
That being said there's lots of stuff developers can build leveraging this information. I've had a lot of fun experimenting with BOSS (http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/).
I think this is on the same page and is definitely a step in the right direction for Yahoo.
Right, I've heard Ballmer scream "Developers, Developers, Developers" just like everyone else--but what are they doing about it (when it comes to search)?
I heard there might be something akin to Facebook Connect for site logins, but it doesn't sound like that's in here. FB connect, OpenID and the like seem like an area with big potential. I think Facebook stands a good chance at taking that market outright since they have such a huge active user base already.
Yahoo could also become a lot more relevant to the average web user if these things gain some uptake. Good luck to them, I don't use many of their services but have to recognize the significant contributions to open source and the web they've been making recently.
Yahoo! has been an OpenId provider since Jan 30 of this year (http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/01/yahoo-openi...). Also YOS supports OpenSocial, so it's very much similar to Facebook Connect (Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see any features FB Connect has that YOS doesn't). I'm not sure about the market share point you bring up because although FB has lots of users, Yahoo! has roughly 400M more ("500 million monthly users. 180 billion monthly page views. 233 countries."). Not to mention YOS is live and FB Connect isn't. Either way I'm excited for both!
I had said active users specifically. Facebook has exceptionally active users. Yahoo has a lot for sure, and I wouldn't want to underestimate them (they may be hurting in the stock market, but they do have a real and large online presence still), but also a lot of inactive users, accounts registered because someone had to in order to use one of their services like Yahoo Groups. Myspace I would bet has a huge number of inactive users too. Plus, the perception is that Facebook is on the rise and Yahoo is on the decline. That makes YOS seem like a desperate move and FB Connect seem like innovation, when they're very similar in reality and both innovative.
As for OpenSocial, yeah it is pretty similar so we'll see. OpenID on the other hand has yet to be implemented in a way that makes sense to non-techies and that makes non-techies actually care about it. FB Connect, with the right partnerships (which seems like that's their strategy) could really take off, and is dead simple for the end user, unlike OpenID. I have my doubts that OpenID will ever be made easy enough and gain widespread use.
"500 million monthly users" means users who are active at least once a month, which I think qualifies as active. That's not counting every registered account at all (I'm not sure there's any official numbers on that but it's a lot higher than 500M). Sure it's arguable Facebook users are more engaged, but point taken. Facebook is cooler and on the rise in peoples minds. I'm not sure I see how Facebook Connect is any more easy to authenticate with than OpenID from a user perspective.
Not to beat it to death :) but I look with a bit of skepticism at their 500m active users. I'm not saying it's not a true figure, but I know I personally fall into that number since I log in about once a month to do something on a Yahoo Group for example, and while I'm definitely a monthly user I'm certainly not an actively engaged user, and Yahoo will have a hard time getting someone like me on board with their social efforts. I bet a substantial portion of their users are in the same boat. Maybe they use their mail or groups or sites or something else, but I think it will be tough turning that into a coherent social network just like I think Google would have a tough time doing the same with their user base, and their accounts have been synchronized across services from the get-go.
All my friends and family are already on Facebook. They all use it actively, and daily, for posting photos, events, keeping in touch, pokes and eaves dropping, etc. It's the new email, it's the new IM, it replaces our need for flickr and a bunch of separate services, and so on. It provides a personal experience you don't get with Myspace et al, and you'd be hard-pressed to pull them away from that.
If a site I go to, or they go to, has the little FB icon they can click it, they may already be logged in and simply click "allow this site to access my profile" or whatever. If not, they enter their FB login info which they'll remember because it's a) their email and b) a password they enter all the time, and they're off. Since the Connect portion is on Facebook already, Firefox may already pre-fill their login info too. Compare that to OpenID where you have to remember something that looks like a URL on top of your username and password for your OpenID provider. The fact is, average users aren't grokking OpenID (didn't Yahoo themselves just publish something to this effect?), and I personally think it's a failure in the design of OpenID itself, which makes it particularly hard to fix.
The biggest play for OpenID right now I think is Windows Live becoming a provider. That may change things, but Yahoo being on board I don't think will do it. But we'll have to wait and see.
Not really :) I tease my girlfriend because she's on it sometimes for an hour or more at a time, but it's 'cause she's using the chat mostly. I'm generally more antisocial online; I disable chat and basically use facebook to keep up with out of town family and to play chess/scrabble.
I do think there's something important to people about what they've built though, which is something hopefully Yahoo and the others will be able to figure out too, but has so far eluded the other social networks. I like Yahoo, and I'm actually rooting for them. I'd really like to see Yahoo get back on its feet, and I hope it can do so independently of Microsoft. That would be great to see :)
I would LOVE to see some quantitative measurements of the effect that opening up a platform to developers has on the respective company.
End of the day, is (extra_revenue_from_custom_applications_and_exposure - resources_to_maintain_platform - customers_lost_to_crappy_apps_or_platform_issues) > 0?
Obviously the formula is more complicated and varies from company to company, but I would love to see a good discussion from an insider who's gone through it.
In particular, you can use the new Yahoo! Social Platform APIs to access social data for Yahoo! users. For example, your application could easily post activity from your existing app to Yahoo! using the Updates API.
Actually, App Engine is a different kind of thing.
GAE is a platform where your app is hosted on their servers.
YAP is a (mostly) open social compliant app delivery platform that lets you create apps and deploy them on our web pages.
GAE is a competitor to Yahoo Small Business, I suppose, since it's a paid hosting service. We're working very closely with Google, MySpace, and a bunch of other partners on making Open Social a success. (NB: you can also create Open Social apps for those other platforms, as well.)
In addition to Open Social, there are things like YQL and other extensions that Yahoo has developed in-house. Some of those may make it into the OS spec, where it makes sense to do so.
Please keep the comments coming here and on the blog post. Feel free to message me if things don't work. If I can't answer your question, I'll be able to at least bug the person who can. Direct feedback is always the best.