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Yahoo! Opens Floodgates On Homepage To Devs
alphadogg writes to mention that at their "Open Hack Day" conference today and tomorrow, Yahoo plans on opening the floodgates to their homepage in hopes that developers will start building massive numbers of applications for general distribution. "Announced in April 2008, YOS [Yahoo's Open Strategy] aims to open all of the company's online services, sites and applications to third-party developers, as well as give end users a 'social profile' dashboard to unify and manage their Yahoo services. Swinging wide open the doors of Yahoo.com to external developers is a big milestone in this ambitious effort. Until now, Yahoo has erred on the conservative side when it comes to allowing tightly-integrated applications for its home page, opting to work individually with hand-picked partners."
Yahoo is used as a gigantic portal, "Internet utility" and some kind of communication platform. They were never a good search engine, their hopes went away as early as DEC got Altavista.com up. Inktomi gave them some band aid but they finally figured it is a good corporate search engine, not something to race with Google.
While Internet was small, their directory was good, that is all. In fact, this is what Yahoo was, originally: http://dir.yahoo.com/ . People tend to forget that for some period of time, they completely gave up "search" and used Google backend. They are switching to Bing now which interestingly surprises people.
Google is the clear "lets do a portal like them" wannabe(!) guy here, their iGoogle isn't at My.Yahoo of 1999 level yet. They also deal with a huge problem as even Joe Sixpacks started to say "enough with your leech of my data" to them. That was never a problem with Yahoo.
You should travel to Asia, especially Japan and Hong Kong to see their real power.
Yahoo has about twice as many daily unique visitors as Facebook, so I'm not so sure about the "fewer eyes" part.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Their search page looks more like a search engine. I still don't use it, but clutter isn't the problem.