Yahoo! Open Strategy

I had brunch with a friend who works at Yahoo!, and as we talked I realized I had missed the significance of Y!OS.  Per Neal Sample "Yahoo! serves more than 500 million unique users every month. We serve 120 billion page views per month. Yahoo! users spend 235 billion minutes a month on our sites. More importantly, some 10 billion relationships exist on user buddy lists and in Yahoo! address books. All that represents a mind-boggling audience for developers."

The key here is that as a part of Y!OS Yahoo! will open up the "connections" created by the mail address book and messenger buddy lists (as well as their social networking services) to the developers.  That's huge.

In order to do that, Yahoo! has homework to do - they are rewiring their data internally.  Their CTO says: "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."

This is a unique opportunity for the developers...