Yahoo Goes Social

On Monday Yahoo took the lid off Yahoo Open Strategy (or Y!OS for short) with a major retooling of Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo start page, and new a Yahoo Toolbar.

Originally introduced in April, Yahoo! Open Strategy is the companies plan turn itself into an open social platform. The goal behind Y!OS is to "deliver open, industry-leading platforms that attract the most publishers and developers."

Yahoo's updates for Y!OS, included:

• Yahoo! Mail - Announced separately today,Yahoo! Mail's smarter inbox focuses on streamlining access to a user's most relevant and useful information. The new Welcome Page surfaces email messages, information and activity from people users care about most, and the integration of relevant third party applications will allow users to be more productive, all from within their inbox. The Yahoo! Mail smarter inbox is the company's largest-scale implementation of the Y!OS initiative to-date.
• My Yahoo! - Beginning today, My Yahoo! users can enhance their personal start pages by adding applications created by third-party developers. Built using the Yahoo! Application Platform, these interactive "apps" will range from productivity tools to games, and will infuse My Yahoo! with new social relevance. Also being launched today, a new My Yahoo! Theme API lets third-party designers create and share their own look and feel for My Yahoo! pages, giving users access to an even wider range of creative backgrounds and styles.
• Yahoo! Toolbar - Available for a sneak preview later this week at toolbar.yahoo.com, the new Yahoo! Toolbar will provide constant access to essential online tasks and up-to-the-minute news from the sources that matter most. Features of the new Toolbar that will rollout to users next year include:
  • Apps for checking new emails from Yahoo! and other popular Web-based email providers, monitoring or searching for items on eBay, and finding local movie showtimes.
  • Alerts that notify a user about Updates from their personal connections - including their friends' recent activity across the Yahoo! network and eventually, elsewhere on the Web.
  • Personal search suggestions that surface the sites a user has visited and provide vertical search results directly from the Toolbar.
• Yahoo! Updates - In addition to surfacing friend updates in the new Yahoo! Toolbar and Mail, Yahoo! will begin sharing relevant updates within Yahoo! Music and Yahoo! TV. Yahoo! Updates enable Yahoo! users to have visibility into the online activities of their connections across the Yahoo! network, such as a recently Buzzed article, a hotel review in Yahoo! Travel, adding a new app to My Yahoo!, or a rating on Yahoo! TV. Earlier this fall, Yahoo! began displaying activity updates in Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Buzz, and will include activity updates from other social sites across the Web in the coming months. The Yahoo! Updates platform is also available as an open API, allowing any site on the Web to submit activities into it.

James Kittock, My Yahoo! product lead, answered several questions about the new changes as well as the way Yahoo is opening up My Yahoo! and how developers can create applications for My Yahoo! using the Yahoo! Application Platform.

"Yahoo Mail is what we consider a key starting point on the Web. It’s got 275 million monthly global users," said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail. "We really believe opening up Yahoo Mail will have a game-changing influence on the industry," Kremer said. Developers with Monday's rollout gain access to documentation and guidelines for building applications that run on the new mail canvas, according to Yahoo.

A limited beta testing program has started for bringing in third-party applications into Yahoo Mail. Users will be able to access these applications from within the Yahoo Mail interface. Initial applications include Family Journal, for building a family tree; Flickr, for photo-sharing; Flixster, for sharing movie show times; WordPress, for posting photos and links to a WordPress blog; Xoopit, for sharing photos stored in e-mail, and Yahoo Greetings, to send e-cards.