There's a lot more going on than just little bits and pieces here and there. All of these projects, and more that I haven't mentioned (and still more that Yahoo hasn't launched yet but are in the works) are part of the search engine's new Yahoo Open Strategy. Michael Arrington detailed what Yahoo's CTO Ari Balogh and Chief Architect (Platforms) Neal Sample had to say about the strategy, referred to as YOS internally. It is nothing short of a complete re-envisioning of what Yahoo is and what it does.
Here's the line from Arrington's post that really sums it up: “Yahoo wants to turn itself into one big social network-driven site, and simultaneously open many of its core services to get users and developers thinking of Yahoo as their Internet hub.” In short, Yahoo isn't trying to organize the world's information (that's Google's goal); it's trying to capture the world's attention.
But they're not trying to do it with the walled-garden approach that failed so spectacularly with AOL. For example, they joined the Google-led Open Social Initiative, and they're encouraging third parties to enhance their search engine; SearchMonkey is just one example of this.
Arrington noted that there are three prongs to YOS: platformization, opening services, and portability. All three of these should vastly improve the user experience. Most of all, they'll make it much easier to use any part of Yahoo in general.
For example, if you use Yahoo to any great degree, you might have an account on Flickr, del.icio.us, Yahoo 360, Yahoo Mail, participate in Yahoo Groups...you get the idea. You might have different logins and/or profiles. One of Yahoo's goals under the platformization initiative is to reduce those profiles to a single, unified Yahoo user profile.
Yahoo opening its services encompasses a few different things, most of which will be more apparent to developers than casual users. Basically, they're going to enable developers to create third party applications which will be deeply integrated with Yahoo services. Yahoo will also offer the Yahoo Application Platform, which will let users host their independent applications using Yahoo's resources. If that sounds familiar, it's because Google already offers something very similar: the Google App Engine.
With its portability initiative, Yahoo is going where Facebook feared to tread. It will encourage the spread of Yahoo widgets and even user data around the web. One example of this, cited by Sample, is the ability to synchronize the Yahoo address book with Plaxo.
This is a huge project, and questions remain as to whether Yahoo can execute it effectively. If they can, though, they're not going to look very much like Google when they're done. Search will be only a part of a much bigger picture. Rather than competing head to head with Google, Yahoo is working to change the rules of the game, or maybe change itself to better suit the future it sees coming: a future that looks different from the one Google apparently sees. Google accomplished something similar when it first came on the scene and upset the balance, making Yahoo and even Microsoft scramble to adjust to the new order. Is it Yahoo's turn to upset the apple cart?
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