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Yahoo! Open hack day to "open" today
By Jaya Kishore B
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Saturday, 13 September 2008, 17:43 IST
Sunnyvale,CA: Yahoo! Inc. one of the leading global Internet brand has announced its Open hack day edition for this year. Ari Balogh, Chief Technology Officer at Yahoo! said that talented developers are being invited to take part in this once in a year event which is to be held on September 12 and 13 at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale. It will be an opportunity for developers to take advantage of Yahoo! platform to get huge audience for their applications.
More than 500 million users use Yahoo! Services every month. They serve 120 billion page views per month. They spend 235 billion minutes a month on Yahoo! sites. Importantly, some 10 billion relationships exist on user buddy lists and in Yahoo! address books. All that represents a mind-boggling audience for developers.
"If you are a developer with a dream to impact an insane number of people with your work and don't want to start small, dazzling only a few bunch of people with your incredible codes, then Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) should be a perfect platform for you. It's a cool and one of the most happening event where you can write code that will meaningfully reach millions of users in a single bound. That's the promise of an open Yahoo!." said Balogh.
One can write applications that build on existing Yahoo! applications like Yahoo! Mail, Sports, Search, our front page, mobile, My Yahoo! to tap into millions of loyal users, and make Internet experience more relevant and useful. "We are rewiring Yahoo!, building platforms that fundamentally change how Yahoo! works," Balogh added.
Yahoo!'s open strategy: Today lots of Internet companies are on the "open" bandwagon. But "Open not only our strategy, it's necessity in mobility because of its complexity," said Marco Boerries, Executive VP at Yahoo!. But Yahoo! has been in the "open" camp for years, starting simple with RSS feeds in 2003. Now Flickr is the second-most popular API on the Web. Currently the company is leading the industry's efforts to embrace open development.
A first taste of Yahoo!'s strategy was SearchMonkey, which lets developers mash up helpful data with their search engine results. "A Japanese restaurant would no longer be a simple link. Instead, it could include a photo, address, ratings, reviews, and links to online reservations," informed Balogh. Now, Search Monkey available and already attracting bunch of users across the globe.
"Y!OS will let developers make Yahoo! portable so that everywhere you go, a more relevant, social and useful online experience is available to you," said Boerries. Shopping on a third-party site, Web on your TV (TV widgets), Yahoo! One Search, mobile sites exclusively for mobiles for faster, beautiful experience and powerful features could be some examples for this.
"For instance, future of Yahoo! Search will not be just content search, but it will be intent search. Instead of giving just web links to the related search item, next wave would be understanding the needs of the user and delivering the content exactly what he wanted using Artificial Intelligence(AI) technology," said Prabhakar Raghavan, Head, Yahoo! Research.
Though it looks like following in the footsteps of Facebook, Google, it is not the case, claims Yahoo! "Y!OS is basically the rewiring of Yahoo, which perhaps would make the consumer experience more social," Balogh added.
(The author is at Yahoo!'s headquarters currently on invitation from Yahoo!)
