Digital Media Buzz > Yahoo! Moves Ahead With Y!OS

Yahoo! Moves Ahead With Y!OS

By Barbara Gengler

As Yahoo! moves forward to deliver open, industry-leading platforms to developers and publishers, the company is advancing its Open Strategy (Y!OS), allowing third-party applications to plug into services like Yahoo Mail.

The Y!OS also looks to fit together the Yahoo! experience with the best online content and services as it offers developers an open, scalable, plug-and-play platform along with the ability to wire up alternative APIs using Y!OS components such as Yahoo! Query Language, for querying and manipulating data from Yahoo and other sources.

Cody Simms, senior director of product management for Y!OS, says APIs are core to the company’s business and Yahoo! is heavily invested, but he declined to comment right now on future APIs.

He did point out, however, that developers are interested in syndicating their applications to Yahoo’s users around the world and that some enjoy Y!OS Query Language (YQL) service, for example, because it is a very powerful data access tool that makes developers lives easier.

“Y!OS is attractive for many reasons, certainly traffic from the Y!OS network is one and also the developer convenience and ease of use of tools is another big plus,” Simms says.

At the heart of Y!OS are complementary platforms that allow developers to access Yahoo! network data and develop applications by using an open authentication standard.

The Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) enables developers to access data from any source on the Internet. It is a single endpoint that allows developers to query, filter and combine data across Yahoo! and external sources such as RSS feeds or HTML pages.

The Y!OS Application Platform (YAP) provides multiple options for developing applications, including JavaScript, server-side hosted and Flash-based applications, which can be used not only on the Yahoo! network through YAP but also can be used off-network as data for socially aware applications. It consists of software and services that enable developers to build Web applications that are available throughout Yahoo!

What’s more, Yahoo! has opened up the ability for developer applications to reach more people through Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP), which allows developers to write applications right into Yahoo Mail and Yahoo’s home page is customizable with users able to add applications. The YSP can be used on the Yahoo! network through YAP as well as off-network as data for developers socially aware applications.

“In summary Y!OS is about delivering on three main components: rewiring Yahoo! on a platform foundation; opening Yahoo which includes open standards and data and infusing the social element throughout,” Simms says.

Yahoo! is working with developers that include Mint.com, personal financial developers; SNOOTH, a social network, recommendation engine and shopping site that revolves around wine and a number of publishers where Y!OS is included in their offerings, such as Disqus (global comment system), JS-KIT (next generation commenting systems) and JanRain (which provides OpenID solutions for businesses and end consumers) in services that provide social sharing and multiple logins.

SNOOTH, in partnership with MyRecipes.com, recently created the A-Z Wine Pairing application to help users of the new Yahoo! homepage and My Yahoo! find perfect wine pairings for more than 30,000 recipes.

And Mint.com launched Budget, a new application that helps users of the Yahoo! homepage and My Yahoo! stay on top of their budgets, track spending and get personalized alerts in one secure place.

According to Mint.com, the openness of the Yahoo! platform allowed the company to build a version of its product that “helps ensure everyone has access to a clear picture of their financial standing.”

One of Yahoo’s early developers, Gigya, integrated the YAP into its technology and user interface, allowing the company’s users to collect their favorite widgets. Yahoo! users who save widgets from Gigya publishers will be able to view those widgets as thumbnails displayed in the “Widget Wall” application on their My Yahoo! page.

Yahoo’s Simms says partners like Gigya are important to the success of YAP as Gigya provides a content syndication infrastructure that enables Yahoo! users to bring more content from across the Web into their Yahoo! experience.