After testing social networking Mash and Yahoo 360 inconclusive, Yahoo is trying a different approach to facilitate linkages between its users. “We reconnectons Yahoo of the Interior, with a platform for developers that will give access to our services as never before, making the user experience entirely social,” said Ari Balogh, director of technology group at the conference Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Francisco.”A technological revolution is underway”.
And to indicate that a technological revolution is currently underway in its infrastructure, dans le cadre du projet Yahoo Open Social (YOS), which should extend until 2009. Its goal: to appeal to web developers to capitalize on the flagship applications such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, the customizable home page or the engine, to provide all their users real social functions.With an ambition priority: centralize the management and unify the profiles of users. “We do not create another social network. We want to review the user experience to become social. It is proposing a new dimension, not a new site, “said Ari Balogh.The results pages tailored with Search Monkey So far, the portal was not able to bring all its products and all profiles of its users. It is one of the major criticisms that have been made, giving at the same time the impression of having a strategy scattered.
According to Ari Balogh, there are more than 10 billion potential interactions between the 500 million users that Yahoo claims in the world. By unifying profiles, it will notably reproduce the graph of these social relationships and interactions, like that proposed by Facebook example, through its news feed system (which tracks the activities of all its contacts in Facebook) . And the company guarantees that features privacy will be integrated.
The first illustration of this new strategy is the application Search Monkey, presented in February, which allows developers to create services amending the presentation of results in the search engine portal. “But this is only the tip of the iceberg,” the technical director.The addition of third-party applications to the menu Eventually, the home pages of Yahoo and other services should be processed to reveal information more and more personalized. And great innovation in the philosophy of Yahoo: users can add applications, developed by the group, but also by others. Recall that Yahoo has joined there is little initiative Open Social Foundation, which is supposed to establish standards for creating Web 2.0 applications compatible to all sites.The presentation of this new strategy comes at a crucial week for the portal. He has until April 26 to accept or reject the bid from Microsoft. Yahoo seems fourbir its arguments to force the publisher to raise an offer considered too low. He presented a few days ago quarterly results in line with analysts’ expectations, and therefore adopted an ambitious strategy to catch up on the Web 2.0 sector and transform its portal. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s boss, remains inflexible. If Yahoo refuses to surrender their weapons and the firm’s Redmond said he was ready to enter a battle with its board of directors, even throw in the towel. No question of raising the offer, he still hammered.