Following in the footsteps of AOL earlier this week, Yahoo on Friday talked about its plans to open its online services to third-party developers.
Yahoo calls it the Yahoo Open Strategy, or YOS for short. The mission is to "deliver open, industry-leading platforms that attract the most publishers and developers."
The YOS platform aims to harness Yahoo's audience of a half a billion users per month. The plan is to keep open Yahoo's content repositories to the innovations of the developer community. Yahoo first announced the initiative in April, calling it a major rewiring of Yahoo that blows the doors wide open.
"Yahoo is trying to position itself as a distribution vehicle for third-party content," said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. "This is not a break with anything or a change of direction, it's just a continuation of what they have been talking about for a few months. It would have been really novel if they had done this two years ago."
YOS Innovations Announced
The latest news on the YOS front includes allowing users to search other content, such as classified ads, from within Yahoo Mail, according to The Wall Street Journal. Users can also access online music-download services from within Yahoo Music.
Yahoo said it would redesign its home page to make it easier for users to access these third-party services, and offered demonstrations of how users might add a link to Netflix in the corner of their screens, the Journal reported.
At Yahoo's annual "Hack Day" on Friday, developers had their first opportunity to build versions of their service that integrate with Yahoo's home page or that can be used by Yahoo Mail's 275 million monthly users, the Journal said.
On Tuesday, AOL announced its own plans to open up. The initiative began with AOL opening up its home page...

More... (http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=61853)