Outside the Lines

The reviews of Jerry Yang's performance at the Web 2.0 Summit have not been glowing. The Yahoo CEO's interview with Web 2.0 Summit co-host John Battelle this week has been described as a train wreck, self-delusional, and as making a mockery of the vaunted company he helped create.

During the interview, Yang defined Yahoo's vision as a "consumer brand that allows people to get what they want on the Internet." Yahoo is a destination site with starting points, such as Yahoo Finance and the Yahoo home page, and is rewiring its platform to be more open and extensible. It serves billions of dollars in ads and is the No. 2 search engine. It's a sound strategy. Yahoo is not Google or Microsoft and has to double-down on its core assets and 500 million to 600 million users.

Yang's job is to sell that vision inside and especially outside of Yahoo. The problem is Yang can't sell.

He lacks the out-sized personality and charisma that is needed to inspire confidence in battles for the soul of a company. He said he would "go through walls" for Yahoo, but having personal passion and a vision isn't enough to get others to walk through the walls.

He has to convince employees, shareholders, customers, and partners that no matter how difficult the situation, he can lead Yahoo to the promised land. Think reality-distortion field Steve Jobs, no-software Marc Benioff, dancing bear Steve Ballmer, the disarming Howard Stringer, the professorial Eric Schmidt, or the preacher John Chambers. Bill Gates doesn't have the most charismatic or endearing personality, but he manages to control interviews, delivering the messages he wants.

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington wrote that Yahoo needs its Barack Obama, "someone to make everyone believe that a true leader is at the helm, ready to fight. Someone with a believable plan. Someone who can inspire Yahoo--and Yahoo users--to believe that Yahoo can once again become a force on the Internet."

Yang is ready and willing to fight, but the Chief Yahoo needs a new general to lead his troops.

Watch the full video, courtesy of TechWeb:

Ask a dozen people what "cloud computing" means and you'll get a dozen different answers, all pointing to the network. Rob Boothby of Joyent interviewed more than a dozen technology wonks, including Steve Gillmor, Matt Mullenweg, Tim O'Reilly, Kevin Marks, Rafe Needleman, Stowe Boyd, Brian Solis and myself, at the Web 2.0 Expo, to answer the question, "What is Cloud Computing ?"

Check out the responses in this video:

Netvibes, a developer of customizable start pages, plans to make its widget platform, application programming interfaces, and iPhone version open source, according to CEO Tariq Krim.

"We want to compete with Google widgets," Krim said. "Our container supports Google widgets and every other platform. If we release our code, people will leverage it and grow the reach of our platform."

Krim hopes that supporting a broad range of platforms, including Windows Vista and Windows Live, Mac OS X, Opera, Yahoo, and Google, will inspire the developer community to adopt and innovate on the Netvibes platform.

Netvibes will make money with sponsored widgets, Netvibe Universes, and business services. Opening up the code to developers will enable them to compete on more equal footing with Netvibes as well.

During a post-keynote luncheon with a few reporters, Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh and Yahoo Open Strategy (Y!OS) chief architect Neal Sample shared more details about the inside-out rewiring of the Web giant.

Balogh said that co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang is taking a personal interest in the project, which began in earnest as part of Yang's 100-day plan, which he created when he took the helm of the company from Terry Semel in September of last year. He noted that Y!OS was started before Microsoft came knocking on Yahoo's door. Balogh joined Yahoo from VeriSign just prior to Microsoft's February 1, 2008 takeover bid.

Y!OS is expected to have a material impact on Yahoo's page growth and time spent on the site, as well as revenue. It was baked into the calculations projecting a doubling of its operating cash flow from $1.9 billion to $3.7 in the three-year span.

Version 1.0 of what is being called Y!Open will be released at some unspecified time later this year, and will include a development environment for several properties, a social "activator" and graph engine, an events engine, and a single profile for users, Balogh said.

The activator engine handles the combining of different relationship groupings, such as the Yahoo Mail e-mail address book, Yahoo Messenger contacts, Flickr friends, Yahoo 360, and Yahoo Mash, Sample said. Yahoo will be careful to protect user privacy and won't apply the information without user consent, he added.

"We have to replumb Yahoo to use a single profile and create feeds, a way to consume feeds and Web services APIs and to layer those mechanisms into the platform," Balogh said.

Yahoo is part of the OpenSocial Foundation, along with Google and MySpace, and will be using the specification as part of the Yahoo application framework (see the slide below). OpenSocial allows applications to work across the major social networks, except Facebook at this point, without modification.

Users will have single control panel for assigning where they want the applications to live. Developers will be incented to carry the unified Yahoo user experience with them across other services, although it's not required by the OpenSocial specification, Sample said.

Initially, Yahoo will be vetting applications that touch Yahoo Mail. "We don't want to risk exposing user data," Sample said. "Once they prove themselves we can open up more. We are starting with a toe in the water."

SearchMonkey is the first fruit of Yahoo's new open initiative. It allows developers to alter the presentation of search results, is currently in limited beta and will be in general release within the next several weeks, Balogh said.

Compared to creating a social graph and scaling the back end for 500 million users and 10 billion latent relationships among the Yahoo clan, SearchMonkey is relatively simple feat of openness.

Yahoo has an ambitious and complex task ahead to deliver version 1.0 within this year amidst other distractions, such as Microsoft's courtship of the company. Balogh talks a good game: "The goal is nothing short of creating the best developer environment for creating Internet applications across the Web." Now Yahoo has to show that it can execute.

SAN FRANCISCO--Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo here Thursday, Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh revealed how the company is transforming itself into an open and social platform from the ground up.

"We are taking open to a whole other place," Balogh said. "We are rewiring Yahoo from the inside out with a developer platform that will open up the assets of Yahoo in a way never done before, making the consumer experience social throughout and provide hooks to developers." He noted that Yahoo has 10 billion latent connections across its properties, such as mail, messenger and fantasy sports. (See video of Balogh on stage at Web 2.0 Expo, at the bottom of this story.)

The first example of Yahoo's new openness is SearchMonkey, which was first announced in February. SearchMonkey lets developers build data services for modifying the presentation of search results. Developers create mini applications, using structured data from Yahoo search or from other sources. The goal is get users from to "do" to "done" much more quickly, Balogh said. "We are making the search engine result richer and fundamentally more relevant."

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," Balogh proclaimed. The front page of Yahoo, mail and other properties will be transformed. For example, the mail welcome page will surface messages more relevant to users and the experience will be contextualized to drive the relevant user experience, he said. Users will be able to add applications from Yahoo and third parties on various Yahoo sites and pages, including the home page of Yahoo. "We are rewiring the properties and opening up properties in a consistent way," Balogh said. "It won't be 25 or 30 different experiences."

Balogh discussed the technical architecture--known as YOS, or Yahoo Open Strategy--including an application platform that will allow developers to create apps for consumers to keep their data protected and to chose what data to share and with whom. In addition, Yahoo will unify all profiles for users and developers, which will allow the company to leverage the 10 billion relations and 500 million users to create the social graph of relationships and to manage the event stream (what Facebook calls the Newsfeed).

"We are not creating another social network. We will rewire the entire experience to make it social. We don't think of social as a destination but as a dimension," Balogh said. Along with Google and MySpace, Yahoo is a member of the OpenSocial Foundation, which is developing a specification for building social applications.

"Tremendous creativity will released...It's all about the consumer. We want to enable developers to do all kinds of things with the assets. We need to have a consistent view, and to take a single application that can end up in multiple places and put it exactly where they want it and to choose how and where to share data," Balogh said.

Balogh said that the major transformation of the Yahoo experience will begin later this year, with the first version of what he called Y!Open, including the social graph and tools for developers, as well as event stream feeds (which he called "Vitality").

Y!Open is an ambitious revitalization of Yahoo and way to inject a viral and sticky social dimension into the core of the service. If Yahoo's earnings don't inspire Microsoft to raise its bid, perhaps this vision for transforming the Web icon will.

SAN FRANCISCO--Tim O'Reilly kicked off the keynote sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo here, pacing the stage and evangelizing the power of the Internet.

"The Internet is becoming the global platform for everything," he said, and it will make everyone in the world smarter. "It's an amazing revolution in human augmentation akin to literacy or the formation of cities," he continued. "It's a huge change in the way the world works."

We are entering the world of ambient computing, he proclaimed, as everything is wired into the Internet. "We are in a soup of computing. Web 2.0 is all around us," O'Reilly said. He got nods from the crowd of the converted, who were busy Twittering, Facebooking, blogging, and SMSing, practicing continuous partial attention.

From the high-level view of the Internet revolution year, O'Reilly telescoped down to the exhibit floor, which is populated by more enterprise players, such as IBM and Oracle, than the previous year. It's a sign that Web 2.0, with technologies such as wikis, blogs, tags, social networks, and collective intelligence, is maturing.

There is real money to be made by developing Web 2.0 products for enterprises. Harnessing collective intelligence can lead to the promised land of profits. (O'Reilly's company recently started an enterprise consulting practice to take advantage of the trend, and he also shamelessly touted Wesabe, one of his investments, in his remarks.)

However, the maturing of Web 2.0 and cloud computing, the move to the Internet as a platform, has problems, O'Reilly noted. The market values centralization and consolidation. It values big winners who can dominate a market. O'Reilly cautioned that this situation could lead us back to the world of large, centralized players like Oracle and Microsoft, which could stifle innovation and openness.

The paradox is that applications built on open, decentralized networks are leading to new concentrations of power (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.), he said. He advocated building in an interoperability layer to reduce the harmful effects of having a few companies with enormous power and leverage.

So, the Internet is important and revolutionary, and harvesting collective intelligence is core to Web 2.0 and a way to make more money, according to the pied piper of Web 2.0.

But O'Reilly also recognized that just making money on Web 2.0 or acknowledging the transformative powers of the Internet is insufficient. He challenged the audience of several thousand attendees to have big goals, such as making governments responsive to citizens and building a global immune system through Internet-based efforts. It's not always about the money or augmenting human intelligence.

Zoho users with a Google username and password will be able to log directly into Zoho applications, according to Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of AdventNet, parent company of Zoho.

"Users won't need a separate Zoho account," he told me at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The Google sign-on integration should be finished within two weeks, he said.

Vembu was impressed by Google's cooperation and willingness to work with a competitor. Zoho and Google Docs are both trying to replace Microsoft Office. Google has been willing to contribute code, such as OpenSocial, to the larger community.

Making it more convenient for Google users to work with Zoho applications indicates that Google is open to or supportive of technologies such as OpenID, or that it doesn't view Zoho as a threat. It's most likely a bit of both, and overall, it's good for their mutual users.