Yahoo seeks geek credibility

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Dave Cotter, the chief marketing officer at comparison shopping site Mpire, said that Yahoo's developer program is more varied and less structured than that of other Web properties, such as Amazon and eBay.

With such a large number of Web sites, there's a lot of potential for developers to create mashup applications that combine data from Yahoo's sites.

"Yahoo has kind of been on an acquisition tear the last couple years. The biggest opportunity on the development front is (bringing) together what they have in a centralized manner," Cotter said. "They are somewhat unique in that people can make applications that take advantage of multiple services."

Although Yahoo is stepping up its developer outreach, it remains primarily a media company tied to Web advertising revenue, rather than sales of technology.

But Dickerson contends that the line between technical software developers and content creators is blurring.

"If you look at what people are doing with our APIs, you see bloggers doing things that a publisher is interested in and a developer is interested in," he said. "They care about the same thing that media people care about, but also care about things like consistent (technical) interfaces and stable APIs."

The development program also helps speed up business deals, Dickerson said.

For example, a company called Qoop established a service to print photos from Flickr by using the site's APIs. After building the technical integration, it established a formal relationship with Flickr's parent company Yahoo.

That process is quicker than forging business deals before the technical work is done, and the arrangement sorts out whether partners can do what is promised, Dickerson said.

In addition, Horowitz contends that outsiders can provide valuable add-on products that Yahoo might not think of or devote the resources to.

"The beauty of this model is that it's extremely 'low touch.' What they want is self-service," Horowitz said. "In aggregate, the traffic and awareness generated is worth the cost of storage and bandwidth."

[beverlyFE]

Yahoo service I think has been also used by FriendsEAT.com. Very helpful indeed.