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Jerry Yang: Yahoo will open up further

By Brij ⋅ July 18, 2007 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Jerry Yang, the geek CEO, is giving all the hints that Yahoo will open up to drive next generation of innovation. Will this will mean more APIs around their product line or more disruptive Facebook style live-in-my-house kind of open-ness? Next 100 days will tell as per Jerry:

While we’re one of the biggest services on the web, we need to develop scalable, data-driven open platforms and infrastructure to easily bring in new customers, consumers and publishers. That is why I am taking a fresh look.

The good news is we’re starting with some awesome assets. We have half a billion of consumers in our network who have several trillion dollars in buying power; hundreds of thousands of advertisers with tens of billions in total marketing budgets to invest in order to capture the attention and dollars of our consumers; and, an important and growing network of publishers and developers who are after both consumers’ attention and marketers’ ad dollars.

So to successfully exploit our ecosystem, Yahoo! is going to take advantage of three core strategic principles: insights, openness, and being a partner of choice. That, we believe, will differentiate us from our competitors and help accelerate the development of our marketplace

Facebook model has been analyzed by nearly everybody and there is no reason why Yahoo cannot just copy the same model and provide deep live-in-my-house type of opportunity for application developers. Infact they can go one step further by opening their Yahoo Hosting division to application developers. They should seriously disrupt this model by providing free hosting. Complete hosting free of charge for application developers. Do Facebook on facebook. Added bonus, give access to Yahoo identity system and social tools. Offcourse with major caveat attached - no Adsense allowed!

Also they already have Pipes. They just need to stretch it further inside. (metaphorically speaking). Their social portfolio is pretty strong as well - Bookmarks (Delicious), photo(Flickr), event(Upcoming), and blog community (MyBlogLog). Though they are all stale now but collectively they hold tremendous opportunities. They can do friend-of-a-friend in N-number of ways.

One gets the impression that if they are willing to take Wall Street heat for couple of more years and allow their engineers to run the ship, opportunities are endless.