0) Embed apps on the frontend: The APIs you mention are good, but they are backend APIs or APIs for customizing (say) maps within a widget on your site. I'm talking about opening up the frontend too. A prosaic way of thinking about it is an App Store for each large Yahoo subdomain, starting with search.yahoo.com but ultimately allowing very deep apps that pull from many Yahoo properties. Importantly, app installation buttons should be heavily but tastefully promoted: every relevant URL, map result, or email from an app provider should allow a one-click install with ID and billing optionally from Yahoo.
1) Concrete example: suppose Yahoo allowed website proprietors to embed a widget to the right of search results that linked to them. The widget would display if it met the performance and load requirements of Yahoo Search, and not if it didn't. Given that Yahoo is now powered by Bing, this could be a Windows Phone tile sort of thing. Visualize a minified version of what you'd click on the website to see. Facebook could show your last 5 messages, Mint your last few payments, and so on. Basically, take microformats to the next level and allow site proprietors to create their own onebox experiences.
2) Data: In addition to opening up apps, take every piece of data that Google never made open for fear of giving away a proprietary advantage and throw open the doors with an aggressively priced data.yahoo.com API, both to monetize and to differentiate against Google.
3) Re: Yahoo's open stuff in the 2006-2009 timeframe -- that was grassroots and built by engineers, never really pushed by their leadership as the future.
4) The Y Prizes: One other thought is that if this open strategy works, Yahoo could announce an acquisition tournament for each hot new closed web property. All the Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, and Pinterest clones would register for a three month competition to build an API to Yahoo's spec, with the winner being acquired for a fixed up front cost of say $10M. Cheap for Yahoo, life changing for the 5 man dev teams that would arise for a shot at this prize. These Y Prizes would allow Yahoo to stay ahead of the curve on new stuff without trying to do everything themselves.
5) Moral high ground: Yahoo as the platform for the Open Web would give them the moral high ground and goodwill to pick (and win) a bunch of fights. Always punch up.
0) Embed apps on the frontend: The APIs you mention are good, but they are backend APIs or APIs for customizing (say) maps within a widget on your site. I'm talking about opening up the frontend too. A prosaic way of thinking about it is an App Store for each large Yahoo subdomain, starting with search.yahoo.com but ultimately allowing very deep apps that pull from many Yahoo properties. Importantly, app installation buttons should be heavily but tastefully promoted: every relevant URL, map result, or email from an app provider should allow a one-click install with ID and billing optionally from Yahoo.
Well, if you've tried making a Gmail gadget, it involves unnecessary XML wrangling, many separate pages of documentation, and is nowhere near as simple as it could be. Stripe/Square vs. Paypal show how a good API can transform a category.
Moreover Gmail Gadgets are not heavily promoted nor a profit center for Google, so they are an afterthought. As indirect proof of this, when pg had that recent thread on fixing email, had the Gmail API (+ Gadgets) been a strong API for working with email, people would have brought that up as the obvious solution.
As for OpenSocial, that seemed to me to be big companies banding against Facebook, not actually opening up the web. But we can agree to disagree here.
0) Embed apps on the frontend: The APIs you mention are good, but they are backend APIs or APIs for customizing (say) maps within a widget on your site. I'm talking about opening up the frontend too. A prosaic way of thinking about it is an App Store for each large Yahoo subdomain, starting with search.yahoo.com but ultimately allowing very deep apps that pull from many Yahoo properties. Importantly, app installation buttons should be heavily but tastefully promoted: every relevant URL, map result, or email from an app provider should allow a one-click install with ID and billing optionally from Yahoo.
1) Concrete example: suppose Yahoo allowed website proprietors to embed a widget to the right of search results that linked to them. The widget would display if it met the performance and load requirements of Yahoo Search, and not if it didn't. Given that Yahoo is now powered by Bing, this could be a Windows Phone tile sort of thing. Visualize a minified version of what you'd click on the website to see. Facebook could show your last 5 messages, Mint your last few payments, and so on. Basically, take microformats to the next level and allow site proprietors to create their own onebox experiences.
2) Data: In addition to opening up apps, take every piece of data that Google never made open for fear of giving away a proprietary advantage and throw open the doors with an aggressively priced data.yahoo.com API, both to monetize and to differentiate against Google.
3) Re: Yahoo's open stuff in the 2006-2009 timeframe -- that was grassroots and built by engineers, never really pushed by their leadership as the future.
4) The Y Prizes: One other thought is that if this open strategy works, Yahoo could announce an acquisition tournament for each hot new closed web property. All the Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, and Pinterest clones would register for a three month competition to build an API to Yahoo's spec, with the winner being acquired for a fixed up front cost of say $10M. Cheap for Yahoo, life changing for the 5 man dev teams that would arise for a shot at this prize. These Y Prizes would allow Yahoo to stay ahead of the curve on new stuff without trying to do everything themselves.
5) Moral high ground: Yahoo as the platform for the Open Web would give them the moral high ground and goodwill to pick (and win) a bunch of fights. Always punch up.