Yahoo! Embraces Open Development for Apps

Yahoo! has been working on creating service portals and social applications on its own (i.e. OneConnect), but on Wednesday announced it was joining the open development world by giving developers access to its platform, some of its services like Yahoo! Mail, and all Web sites, in order to customize user experiences.

Application developers can create mash-up apps that bring together everything from e-mail to fantasy baseball into one social platform, namely. It sounds somewhat like a widget approach: If you would like to be notified via mail message that someone has posted to their Flickr account, you can do that.

The approach is an echo of what it recently announced within its mobile strategy, and fits in well with the trend towards social aggregation.

"Basically, we're letting developers centralize anything you do on the Web as an update on our platform ─ with your explicit permission, of course," wrote Jay Rossiter, senior vice president of the Yahoo Open Strategy, in a blog. "Publishers love this because they get exposed to more visitors whose friends implicitly recommend their content."