San Francisco — Yahoo might look a lot like islands of Web properties, but the company has started a mammoth re-engineering project that will unify the disparate services Yahoo runs into one huge platform. On Thursday, Yahoo announced its “Open Strategy” at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
“We are not building another social network,” Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh told more than 1,000 attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco on Thursday. “We are building social into everything we do.”
It anticipates the project will transform the site into a vast social network where Yahoo users can quickly find and communicate with each other.
The project is also aimed at making it easier for web developers to use Yahoo data and services for their own ends.
“Imagine a world where you can write code that will meaningfully reach millions of users in a single bound,” wrote Yahoo’s Neal Sample on the company’s Yodel Anecdotal blog.
The struggling portal may be putting forth the bold strategy as a way to fend off Microsoft’s advances, observers say. Opinions are mixed as to whether it is a wise move.
Yahoo caters to more than 500 million unique users and 120 billion page views each month. Yahoo users “spend 235 billion minutes a month on our sites” and “10 billion relationships exist on user buddy lists and in Yahoo address books,” said Sample. Yahoo plans to unlock its “massive latent social network,” he said.
Open Strategy encourages developers to use Yahoo’s huge scale, he added, “to write applications that build on our existing properties,’ such as Mail, Sports, Search, the front page, mobile, My Yahoo, and others. Yahoo-owned properties also include the photo-sharing site Flickr, the bookmarking site Del.icio.us, and the social-calendar site Upcoming.
Charlene Li, an analyst with industry research firm Forrester, wrote on her blog that Yahoo’s rewiring “is a significant step forward in the next phase of social networks and the social Web.”
Li continued that she does not see Open Strategy as a “Hail Mary” from Yahoo to counter Microsoft’s efforts to acquire the company. She added that it is only a matter of time before Google, Facebook and other sites respond to the huge social environment and social driver that Yahoo can become.
The first project in YOS is “SearchMonkey,” Yahoo Search’s new open developer platform. The SearchMonkey site offers a limited developer preview you have to sign up for if you want to participate.
The announcement came two days before the expiration of a deadline set by Microsoft for Yahoo to agree to a merger. Microsoft has threatened to mount a hostile takeover if Yahoo refuses the offer or does not respond.
On May 15, Yahoo will hold a developer’s party for those interested in SearchMonkey, at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Developers can register here.