Sunnyvale, Calif., — With the outcome of repeatedly failed talks with Microsoft and out-and-out battles for boardroom supremacy, Yahoo is fighting a tough battle to regain its former glory. The search firm continues to hold one of the largest user bases of any search engine, but it still struggles.
During the weekend about 300 hackers armed with laptop computers, camping tents and dreams of software glory descended upon Sunnyvale, Calif., to sow the seeds of what Yahoo hopes will be an answer to Google’s Internet might, as the Internet pioneer opened its strategy and its doors to outside developers.
The “hackathon” was to a large extent a symbol of Yahoo rising from the ashes of a burned-out courtship with US technology colossus Microsoft as it was a chance for software wizards to work their magic on Yahoo’s platform.
With 500 million unique visitors every month, and 300 million of them registered users, Yahoo has a plethora of traffic to work with. But its toolset is lagging behind the competition. The event known as Open Hack Day 2008 — is being held at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., offices. Developers in attendance can write little programs, called “hacks,” said Christopher Yeh, head of the Yahoo Developer Network.
“There is this concept of a hack, and at it the coders will be the first from outside the company to get their hands on a number of programming interfaces Yahoo is releasing in an attempt to enliven its stodgy but still powerful Internet properties is a clever or ingenious way that you put together a program that demonstrates something useful and fun,” he said.
For instance, a developer at Yahoo has built a hack program combining Flickr photos with Yahoo’s My Trips, for storing information about vacations. Hacks are typically assembled quickly but based on an innovative concept. Yahoo plans to judge hacks and present awards to the top entries at the event on Saturday.
It was Yahoo’s fourth Hack Day (the first one occurred in Sunnyvale two years ago, while others have since taken place in London and Bangalore).
This Hack Day, though, takes on special meaning since Yahoo earlier in the week outlined a shift to an “Yahoo Open Strategy” that it believes will jazz-up the website and lead to meshing offerings from hot online properties such as Amazon and iTunes, which will open many of its sites to outside developers, who can then build applications around them.
“Open is a really important strategy for us,” Yahoo Developer Network head Chris Yeh said in a statement as hackers fueled up on pizza, keg beer and caffeine-based energy drinks for all-night software writing sessions.
“It is a new course for the ship. Our ability to turn Yahoo from a company that owns and operates its own sites to a company that lets other people in on the action is a critical growth moment. This is really exciting.”
Hackers that made the cut will be treated to plenty of free food and beverages, and access to some of Yahoo’s upcoming APIs for building out social applications.
Co-founder David Filo says “we believe openness is going to happen with or without us. We would rather be at the center of it.” That is true for a variety of current business models, including a battle Microsoft has been fighting for years against open source software and now increasingly, hosted software applications from the likes of Google and other web startups.
Hacks are not the only method for leveraging Yahoo development technologies. Developers also can use the company’s BOSS (build your own search service) APIs to create applications. Outside of Yahoo, a developer has built a site called Cluuz, which leverages these APIs to provide enhanced searching featuring images and other related information. Revenue opportunities for Yahoo from such a site could include fees for using search APIs or search advertising, said Yeh.
BOSS caught the attention of Open Hack attendee James Brady, CTO at WebMynd, which provides an extension to the Firefox browser that serves as a personalized search experience. “[BOSS is] a really, really valuable thing for us,” Brady said.
“We are thinking we might be able to leverage Yahoo’s index with the information that we gather to help give our users a better search experience,” Brady said.
According to Yahoo, it expects “hundreds” of developers to attend Open Hack Day on Friday and Saturday, while Google hosted more than 3,000 developers at its I/O event in May. Developers have created more than 25,000 applications for Facebook since that company opened up its platform about a year and a half ago. MySpace’s developer programs also got up and running months ago.
Yahoo also will discuss technologies such as SearchMonkey, for changing the look and feel of search page results, and Fire Eagle, providing location-based services.
Although Yahoo must compete with Google in the search space, the company focuses on its own technologies rather than centering on the competition, according to Yeh.
“What we do here, we emphasize a much broader range of businesses than Google does,” offering products such as search and content Web sites, Yeh said.
“Yes, we have lots of competitors,” Filo said. “In some ways, we are opening up new level of competition by letting people build on top of us. Ultimately, this is good for the consumer and the Internet.”