Fulfilling a second major part of its promise to make the internal workings of its Web site more extroverted, Yahoo is opening the interface for its address book for outside use.
The move could mean that Yahoo, struggling under business pressures but still a stronghold of Web activity, could become more tightly tied to others' Web services. For example, a programmer starting up a social networking site could use the interface to send invitations to a member's list of contacts stored at Yahoo.
"Our address book has for a long time been one of the top things developers wanted access to," said Chris Yeh, head of the Yahoo Developer Network. That's because, over the years, Yahoo users have filled it with billions of individual records.
Yahoo users have stored more than 500 million address books, and the service is used by more than 150 million unique users each month, Yeh said. "A lot of our address books (are) constantly being updated. It's one of the biggest sources of contact information on the Web," he said.
Opening the address book API (application programming interface) is the second major step taken so far in executing the Yahoo Open Strategy that Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh announced in April. The first step, in May, was opening the SearchMonkey project so outside coders could make more creative use of Yahoo search results.
"The address book is the second proof point. This year, we'll show proof point after proof point," Yeh said.
Yahoo Open Strategy is an attempt to link the company more with other Internet activities rather than remain a sealed-off, if sprawling, Internet domain. Through its open strategy, the company envisions outside programmers building Web applications on Yahoo's site, Yahoo services being incorporated into outside applications, and social connection information within Yahoo being used more widely.
Whether Yahoo will succeed in capturing developer attention and becoming a more dynamic part of new developments remains to be seen. A lot of action--some complementary but much of it competitive--also is taking place at rivals such as Facebook, Google, and any number of small Web 2.0 start-ups.
From the outside looking in
The address book move means outside Web sites will be able to read and write address book information--if a user grants permission through a Yahoo authorization process.
A site with a gift registry could piggyback on the address book so that a person could tell contacts about a wish list of presents, for example, Yeh said. Or a site shipping packages to others could auto-complete the address fields on a Web form.
(And something I'd like to see happen: somebody please endow the address book with an interface that doesn't look like it dates from 1998. I have a lot of contacts stored away in the Yahoo address book, and I find it excruciating to update addresses, scrub out obsolete e-mail addresses, or update mailing lists.)
Explicitly opening the service is more secure than one alternative today, in which a third-party site asks a user for Yahoo log-in credentials so it can access the site and scrape the contact information.
"There's no control over what happens after a user gives that (username and password). The third party could use it to log in to mail or any other part of Yahoo," Yeh said. "It's not a real secure method."
Yahoo isn't opening up the interface for an address book creation, though, which means it won't at least for now be usable as a generic back end for a Web site's address book needs.
Social graph theft?
One interesting possibility raised by the openness is whether an outside company might use it to steal, in effect, a user's social graph--the collection of connections each user often must laboriously reproduce as he or she joins a new site. Social graphs are a key asset of Web sites with a social element, in part because it's hard to reproduce them elsewhere. So once a user constructs one, there's a strong incentive to remain loyal to a site.
Yahoo isn't concerned about that, in part because opening the interface will mean other sites will be able not only to extract contact information from Yahoo, but also to synchronize changes on their sites back with Yahoo, Yeh said.
"I don't think we're worried about losing control over our social graph. All the things we're doing now are trying to break down some of the traditional walls Yahoo has had to the outside world," he said. "Yes, absolutely some of our data will get pulled out and be used for benefit of other systems. (But) when people use our system address book APIs, there's just as much a chance somebody will load something back into our network."
One company making use of the Yahoo address book interface is Plaxo, which hosts 40 million users' address books already.
Yahoo itself maintains multiple social graphs--for example, the address book, the Yahoo Messenger buddy lists, and the Flickr lists of contacts, friends, and family.
"Not all this data is combined yet," Yeh said, though one key part of Yahoo Open Strategy is to unify these contact lists and the related user profile pages. "The goal of the next half year is to make sure we bring that together."
The Yahoo address book is the "place we like people to store all their contact information," he said, but it's not a terribly rich social graph. For example, it doesn't currently have a good way to distinguish which contacts would be appropriate to invite to a new social service or to receive gift registry notifications.
"One of the things that we have to do is give users and opportunity to activate their social graph a little bit--essentially, to make sure they can classify the people they're most interested in communicating with on a regular basis so we know how to create a social environment around them," Yeh said.
"Going forward, we'll have to have a better solution for people so we can classify inside our address book who we're closest to and who are at further distance from us," he added. "That's a function of the social work we're doing."
Yahoo Messenger 9 offers a more elaborate friend list and can display videos and photos in the chat window.
(Credit: Yahoo)You can't take it with you, at least when it comes to your social graph.
But with a new beta version of Yahoo Messenger 9 software (download it for Windows) released Thursday, users have new options for reconstructing networks of friends and contacts they've built elsewhere.
The new beta of Yahoo Messenger 9 can help user invite contacts on AOL, Google's Gmail and Orkut, Microsoft's Hotmail, MySpace, and other online services to connect through the Yahoo service. Version 9 also includes a special group of all people in your Yahoo address book, helping to connect with contacts users may have stored elsewhere within Yahoo itself.
Also tying more deeply into the rest of Yahoo, the new beta can be used to reflect some other activities within the network--for example, when somebody spotlights a Web site of interest using Yahoo Buzz.
"We'll add more types of updates in the future," said product manager Sarah Bacon in a blog posting about the new beta.
Yahoo Messenger 9 is intended for use on Windows XP, in contrast to the more obviously named Yahoo Messenger for Vista (download it for Windows Vista). The final version of the Yahoo Messenger 9 is due in the third quarter, Yahoo said. The Mac equivalent is scheduled to be released by the end of the year.
Also new in the beta is a better interface for setting status messages--even if you're away from your IM software, Yahoo said. And links to games present in Yahoo Messenger 8 has made its way to version 9, so users can play pool, checkers, and others. However, only those with version 8.1 or later can play games with those using the version 9 beta, Yahoo said.
Yahoo Messenger's icon, a frighteningly happy face, reflects the fact that people have a whole section of their brains just for processing facial information. Yahoo is tapping into that visual cortex a little more directly with the new beta, which uses larger emoticons.
For further information, check Yahoo's blog about the new beta or a Messenger 9 beta demo video.
One can interpret this as the second reformation of the Internet -- in the first one, users emancipated themselves from a closed set of service and content providers, realizing that they held the power of the web in their own hands. And now, online identities, objects, and connections detach themselves from the grid of the web that constrains their movements. Relationships are disenfranchised from the "container" in which they're held.
Berners-Lee writes: "Biologists are interested in proteins, drugs, genes. Businesspeople are interested in customers, products, sales. We are all interested in friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. There is a lot of blogging about the strain, and total frustration that, while you have a set of friends, the Web is providing you with separate documents about your friends. One in facebook, one on linkedin, one in livejournal, one on advogato, and so on. The frustration that, when you join a photo site or a movie site or a travel site, you name it, you have to tell it who your friends are all over again. The separate Web sites, separate documents, are in fact about the same thing -- but the system doesn't know it. (...) There are cries from the heart (e.g The Open Social Web Bill of Rights) for my friendship, that relationship to another person, to transcend documents and sites. (...) It's not the Social Network Sites that are interesting -- it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web."
And further:
"In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildly differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary."
Not everyone is happy about the term "graph." The most fervent rebuke stems from Dave Winer: "Before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what -- they're exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don't we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.) So if you don't want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated." Robert Scoble, on the other hand, points out that your social network is who you know, while your social graph is who you're connected to based on interests, location, work, etc.: "The Social Graph is NOT my social network," Scoble writes, "My Social Network is my friends list. But the Social Graph shows a LOT more than that."
Berners-Lee would agree with that. For him, the Giant Global Graph is the natural evolution of networking: from computer (net) to documents (web) to things (and friends). Call it Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, the Open Social Web, the Hyper-Social Network, or the Giant Global Graph -- the idea isn't really new, but it appears as if this paradigm is slowly becoming mainstream thinking. As the Global Graph, or whatever you want to call it, is replacing the traditional World Wide Web, new players will want to influence its composition, as they did with hyperlinks and traffic boosting mechanisms on the "old" web. Will we soon see "graph designers"?
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