Digital Media

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--On Friday, 300 programmers will descend upon Sunnyvale, Calif., to plant the seeds of what Yahoo hopes will be an answer to Google's Internet might.

The event is called Open Hack Day 2008, and at it the coders will be the first from outside the company to get their hands on a number of programming interfaces Yahoo is releasing in an attempt to enliven its stodgy but still powerful Internet properties.

There's no guarantee that the release, a key step in what the company calls its Yahoo Open Strategy, will improve Yahoo's financial misfortunes. But it holds promise a strategy that could help Yahoo without having to try to out-Google Google.

That's because YOS marries the best of what Yahoo is with the best of what's happening on the Internet today. More than 500 million people come to Yahoo sites each month, 300 million of them registered users who log on, and they're coming for Yahoo's content and services. Yahoo may not be able to match Google's search engine and accompanying search ad money machine, but YOS ultimately could help improve Yahoo's assets, attract new partners, and bolster the company's advertising revenue.

"We believe openness is going to happen with or without us. We'd rather be at the center of it," said co-founder David Filo in an interview.

Here's an example of YOS in action that Ash Patel, head of Yahoo's audience products division, showed Thursday. The Yahoo home page, which is being revamped to show content customized for each user, houses an application from Netflix showing the movies a user ordered and new recommendations. Yahoo search is augmented to let people order more movies straight from the search results. And an application within Yahoo Mail could let users rate their movies and chat with Netflix members on their buddy list who've already seen it.

The pressure's on
Here's the rub, though: YOS will take time to build, and time is not on Yahoo's side.

Yahoo, faced with near-term pressures from Microsoft and activist investor and now board member Carl Icahn, would have preferred a quick fix to its business, and perhaps a cash infusion from Yahoo's search-ad partnership with rival Google will help in that regard.

YOS is a longer-term strategy, though. It's taken months to rewire the company's infrastructure to accommodate the vision. It'll take more months to coax programmers and business partners into using it. And still longer to attract Yahoo users to adopt the new features.

As Yahoo languished in recent years, new online services squarely in Yahoo's back yard, such as Facebook and Twitter, had time to put down serious roots. And of course Google has encroached, too: its search-ad revenue has funded any number of affronts to Yahoo, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google News, Google Finance, Orkut, and Blogger.

Of course, Yahoo believes that its clout on the Internet will give it the necessary leg up. So the next start-up, for example, could get traction quickly by drafting off Yahoo's page views and user base.

"Yahoo allows developers to create applications for the world's biggest audience," Patel said. "And they're able to do monetization for advertising. Those two are huge value propositions."

The company is betting the money will come its way, too. Yahoo expects to gain better insight into what users are doing, and consequently better predict what sorts of content or advertising the users want. "The better signals you have, the better you can serve the right content," and being able to target ads better means Yahoo can charge higher rates, said Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh. "We expect lots of material benefit."

What's coming Friday
So what will be new on Friday? For those programmers who made the Hack Day cut, a pizza- and soda-fueled opportunity to toy with two broad categories of new Yahoo APIs (application programming interfaces), said Neal Sample, chief architect for Yahoo's platforms.

First is a collection of social APIs that let programmers use data such as a Yahoo user's address book contacts, status messages, profile information, and news feed items. Second is the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP), which will be used to write the applications that actually will run on Yahoo Web pages. YAP has some similarities to the OpenSocial project initially begun by Google but now supported by several others, including Yahoo.

The first Yahoo property to get the application support will be a redesigned profile page, a "control panel" site where people can record personal information, update their status, and see their social connections, Sample said. "We're going to get to the point where all our profiles can start coalescing so you have the concept of a single identity on Yahoo."

Over this year and into 2009, the support will extend to the My Yahoo personalized home page, Yahoo Mail with its 270 million users, and the Yahoo front page that's being redesigned with a customization feature called the content optimization engine.

If all goes according to plan, the collection of new interfaces and applications will "light up a user's social graph," building Yahoo more deeply into a person's online interactions, for example by spotlighting a person's most important contacts in Yahoo Mail.

Fresh air
Yahoo will call Open Hack Day a success if it produces developers happy with the company and feedback about the interfaces, said Chris Yeh, head of the Yahoo Developer Network. But there's something in it for Yahoo, too: a breath of fresh air. "Big companies do become insular at times...We do everything we can to try to avoid that."

Programmers not at Open Hack Day will only be able to see the API documentation at first, but the final APIs will be public soon. "In a few weeks, we're making them generally available," after Yahoo gets feedback from the early testers, Sample said.

These new programming interfaces will join other parts of YOS already released recent months: SearchMonkey lets people write applications that spruce up search results with elements such as LinkedIn profiles or restaurant reviews. BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) lets others build their own search engines on Yahoo's, reordering or modifying results however they want and sharing search ads or revenue if they get popular.

Newest is Fire Eagle can keep track of a person's location information, including a mechanism to let users control what services may employ that information.

A few other APIs are planned for later release, Sample added, including some for geographic services.

Proceed cautiously
Embracing openness--standards, open-source software, open interfaces--is a tried and true way technology companies try to leapfrog incumbent competitors. But retrofitting openness to a company that's been closed is difficult, and Yahoo clearly is concerned about breaking what it's built by moving at start-up speeds.

"Getting it right with hundreds of millions of users is harder than if you're starting from scratch," Filo said.

And it's not just about revealing APIs and doing some marketing. "We have to get the platform right so we can ensure the applications don't degrade the user experience," Patel said, for example by caching applications on Yahoo servers so pages load fast. "It is stuff that does keep us up at night."

Consequently, Patel said, the company will vet applications before letting them onto Yahoo sites--especially for Yahoo Mail site, where so much personal information resides.

Yahoo also wants to ensure users are in control when it comes to the permissions they grant to applications, said Venkat Panchapakesan, leader of Yahoo's audience technology group.

So it's tricky work for a lumbering giant. If successful, though, Yahoo will be able to reclaim some of the Internet initiative it once had in spades, potentially rearranging today's competitive landscape.

"Yes, we have lots of competitors," Filo said. "In some ways, we're opening up new level of competition by letting people build on top of us. Ultimately, this is good for the consumer and the Internet."

See also:
• Yahoo gives a taste of its 'open' overhaul
• David Filo: No browser for Yahoo
• Yahoo makes the case for Google search ads
• Yahoo 12-month price target cut
• Yahoo announces social networking app for iPhone
• Top Yahoo sales execs: One in, one out

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--Yahoo showed its vision for what its Yahoo Open Strategy makes possible, demonstrating how it hopes to engage users more by enabling its existing sites to grow beyond their current confines.

Ash Patel, head of Yahoo's Audience Products Division, showed an example that endowed the company's home page, search, and mail sites with the ability to deal with the Netflix video rental site.

The home page was endowed with a new Netflix application that showed movies Patel has ordered and those recommended for him. A search results, augmented with SearchMonkey technology, let him add new movies to his movie queue. And a mail application let him rate his movie directly within an e-mail.

The demonstration was designed to show what can be done by retooling the company's properties to provide a better experience for users--and more opportunities for advertisers.

"Yahoo allows developers to create applications for the world's biggest audience," Patel said. "By engaging developers to create experiences we can get the right experiences across the Web and bring those experiences into the Yahoo front page."

The demonstrations took place the day before Yahoo's Open Hack Day 2008 , in which about 300 outside programmers will see what they can do with Yahoo's technology.

Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh started off the discussion with members of the press at the company's headquarters talking about Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS). "This shows that Yahoo really wants to drive innovation for industry itself," he said. Yahoo plans on Friday and Saturday to let the developers play around with the YOS application platform, Yahoo Mail developer platform, and social programming interfaces.

Update 10:45 a.m. PDT: "These developers will have preview access to YOS," Balogh said, including Yahoo Mail and My Yahoo. "They'll be able to see their stuff right there on the page."

Yahoo hopes customizing the Yahoo front page will make it essential for Web users, 300 million of whom visit the site monthly.

"For those 300 million people, that front page is very relevant and engaging," Patel said, but making it a foundation for new applications is important. "A couple other things would make that front page perfect for them. But what those one or two things are is different for me, different for you, different for everybody."

Update 11:05 a.m. PDT: Yahoo emphasized that the company will make changes, such as adding new widgets to Yahoo sites, only with users' permission. Balogh showed an example of a pop-up that lets users permit or deny a new application.

"It all comes back to creating a model where users can get to what they want to do quickly, with trust," Balogh said.

Update 11:26 a.m. PDT: Yahoo also is banking on bringing a programming foundation to other ways to use the Internet: mobile phones and televisions. Marco Boerries, head of Yahoo's Connected Life division, touted those efforts.

"We want to enable a mobile ecosystem for billions of users," Boerries said.

For mobile devices, Yahoo hopes programmers will use its Blueprint foundation, which Yahoo announced Wednesday now can be used to create standalone applications on mobile devices.

For TVs, Yahoo is working with Intel and other undisclosed partners to bring widgets to TV. Those widgets could run along the bottom or side of the screen or take it over completely, augmenting a TV show or replacing it completely with, for example, a Yahoo member's Flickr photos.

Programmers will soon get access to tools to write TV widgets. "Over the next few months, you will see an SDK," or software development kit, said Oliver Petry, a director of product management working on the TV program.

Among those who've expressed interest in the TV widget program are eBay, Twitter, ABC, CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Plaxo, and Joost, Petry said. A demonstration featured many of those logos.

Dan Farber of CNET News contributed to this report.

Yahoo has released an API (application programming interface) that lets outside Web sites automatically extract information such as top 10 lists from the Yahoo Music site.

For example, a programmer can use the service to search for the numeric ID that Yahoo gives a particular musician, then use that ID to retrieve all the albums by that artist or to retrieve a list of artists Yahoo deems similar, according to self-described Yahoo music nerd Jim Bumgardner on the Yahoo Developer Network blog. The item ID for a particular video can be used to retrieve a thumbnail image for the video or the video itself.

There's a limit of 5,000 queries per day with the API.

The API is an example of Yahoo Open Strategy, the company's effort to open up its infrastructure to use by outside Web sites and to permit more third-party developers to build software that runs directly on Yahoo's sites.

For full details, see the Yahoo Music API site or its developer guide

Update 12:41 p.m. PDT: I corrected a reference that should have been to Yahoo.

Yahoo has begun sharing some future plans it has for Groups, its service where people with shared interests can get together online through mailing lists, calendars, polls, and other features.

In the "coming year," Yahoo plans to add many attributes that expand the scope of groups, according to the Yahoo Groups blog on Tuesday. Those features include tools for product reviews, service directories, wanted boards, address books, and event planners.

And upgrades to existing features include: a better system for hosting photos that permits more storage and larger pictures; better message boards; the ability to store e-mail attachments; and the ability to set the site for non-English languages.

There's no official word about whether there will be room for some of the sharing and collaboration that's coming with Yahoo Open Strategy on Groups, but it seems possible to me. For example, hosting OpenSocial widgets that are available to members of the group seems a natural fit.

Yahoo already has launched a Groups Lab, a team that creates new features such as the recently released People Map beta test that shows group members' locations on a map.

In an attempt to boost its search-ad business, Yahoo has begun a project that lets anyone build a customized search engine atop the Internet company's technology.

The service, which enters public beta testing Wednesday night, is called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). With it, someone can build an independent Web site with a search box, pass users' queries to BOSS, process the results returned by Yahoo's search engines in any manner, and display the results.

Essentially, BOSS is a bid to enable others' search innovation then share profits from the results. It's also the most significant example to date of Yahoo Open Strategy, the company's effort to expose its own technology for outside developers in an effort to become a more indispensible part of the Internet.

The BOSS API (application programming interface) to Yahoo's search is free to use, but BOSS partners that succeed will be required to show search ads, said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search.

"We fully expect it to expand the footprint of Yahoo search advertising on the Web," Raghavan said. "There is no payment of any kind we expect from partners, but we do say in the terms of service up front that over time we will require them as they build and grow out to use our search advertising."

That's a strong statement, given Google's rapid ascent and strength in that very market. Even Yahoo, faced with intense shareholder pressure and a hostile takeover attempt by Microsoft, has tried to hitch itself to the Google star through a search-ad deal with its rival.

But BOSS is an interesting idea nonetheless. Yahoo hopes to attract both entrepreneurs and researchers--it has formal BOSS partnership with Stanford University, the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other educational sites--and it's got more in-depth with some business partnerships the company plans to announce later.

Yahoo already has launched a program called SearchMonkey that lets programmers augment Yahoo's search results with richer displays of information--for example by adding starred reviews or addresses to restaurants listed in search results. That's a skin-deep change compared to what BOSS permits, though, where outside sites can completely alter the order of search results, filter out particular results, display results only of a particular variety, and combine the Yahoo data with internal data.

Yahoo offered some examples of what could be done with BOSS. One idea is a visual search presentation that shows miniature versions of the Web pages atop the textual results. Another, social search, could be used to spotlight results relevant to attributes drawn from a person's social network.

Among those who are trying out BOSS are social search site Me.dium and natural language processing site Hakia.

Setting up a competitive search requires prohibitively large financial resources, Raghavan said. Yahoo estimates roughly $300 million to cover expenses such as staff and the hardware to constantly index new Web pages, analyze the index, and handle queries.

Indeed, search start-up PowerSet, acquired last week by Microsoft, said the difficulty of building a full-scale search business led it to its acquisition by Microsoft last week. "Building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine," said PowerSet product manager Mark Johnson in a blog posting.

With BOSS, Yahoo offers use of its own hardware in exchange for search-ad revenue. It might well be that no single company becomes as dominant as the top three search engines--Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft--but that collectively the smaller players offer more alternatives, Raghavan said.

Monetization of BOSS through search ads is "a few months away," he said.

Programmers may use the BOSS interface for free and, if they get to the stage where search ads are displayed, will share in the revenue. Yahoo doesn't reveal what fraction of search-ad revenue those outside partners would receive.

Yahoo is being careful with the BOSS branding. "You cannot put in any Yahoo attribution. This is not indicative of the Yahoo search product," said Bill Michaels, senior director of Yahoo's search platform.

It's not clear yet what the implications are for BOSS advertising. "Vertical" search sites that cater to a particular audience sometimes could in theory charge premium advertising rates, because they link advertisers to a targeted audience, but it's also possible that visitors aren't as desirable to advertisers than the broad cross section that visits general-purpose search sites.

"There are a bunch of unknowns," Raghavan said. "You might have more focused audiences, which could potentially be enhanced by proprietary data. But on the other hand, it's unclear when you fragment traffic what happens to the overall quality of traffic. You have factors that could weigh in either direction. It's premature to make a clear conclusion on the revenue per search metric."