Yahoo! Opens Up More to the Masses With Y!OS 1.0

By Irina Guseva | Published Oct 21, 2008

What do you do in turbulent economic times? Downsize or produce more? Yahoo! chooses the latter and attempts to re-incarnate itself and “make history again” with the release of its Open Strategy (Y!OS) platform.

The idea behind this initiative is to open up to developers and let them “tap into benefits once only available within Yahoo!” Yahoo! has opened quite a few features, including content, traffic and Yahoo's user base.

Getting More Open, More Social

The release comes equipped with Yahoo!'s Social API suite that brings the Yahoo! network and all its inherent social connections to the table. Available social APIs include:

Social Directory: To access user identity tools, invitations for connection, user contact lists and online presence.
Contacts: To allow developers to access user contact information stored in the user's Yahoo! Address Book.
Updates: To enable developers to collect, organize, and syndicate summaries of user activity and content.
User Status: To expose an individual user's status on the network.

Yahoo! now also supports the social network open standard OpenSocial. OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications using JavaScript and HTML.

Additionally, Y! went ahead and released a new universal user profile — a centralized control panel for users to manage their social connections across Yahoo!

From Open to Proprietary

But don’t get too excited just yet. It’s not all flowers and butterflies in the Yahoo! world. While working on open and social APIs for sites like Flickr and Delicious, the Internet giant is also putting efforts into creating proprietary technologies like Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) and Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP).

YQL is definitely a concern, as this is nothing but an attempt by Yahoo! to lock developers into a programming language. However, as ReadWriteWeb reports, Yahoo! disagrees and compares YQL to OpenID in terms of taking various solutions that work well and then collaborating on them in the organization.

Progressing from the search engines rivalry to Web analytics and now to developer-oriented apps and tools, this seems to be yet another attempt by Yahoo! to stay afloat and at least try to compete with Google. A viable attempt you think?