SUNNYVALE ,CA: Yahoo! in a bid to gain new audience and enrich user experience on its portals revealed its intent to go open. The Internet behemoth has created all its new products based on the concept of Open strategy a part of which involves linking up its media products to third-party content.

Talking about its implications for the consumer, Ash Patel, who heads the Audience Products Division said, “(its about making ) the homepage, search and mail more engaging and more relevant to the users.” Going open from the context of the frontpage means including those things that are different for different people. It also involves engaging developers to create the right experiences, said Patel.

Patel demonstrated how one such application, linked to the Netflix movie rental service, would allow Yahoo users to access their Netflix queues within Yahoo itself. Giving a taste of how third party APIs can be integrated with Yahoo mail, he demonstrated how Netflix could throw up a list of movies that have been watched by friends and also enable interaction through instant messaging within that application.

Mark Risher, head of Yahoo’s Open Mail said that they allowed third parties to build more applications for Yahoo! Mail and demonstrated an application, which links Yahoo Mail to a third party Classifieds website where users can respond from within the yahoo page. The website will be open to linking up to various other portals be it e-mail, social networking or photo sharing websites.

Boss, Yahoo’s new search product allows organizations to build their own search service, while Buzz is an application, which pulls out related popular articles from the Web.

Open for all
Editorial partnerships with other media portals, newspapers and magazines are another major step in its open movement. Yahoo News, which is the main focus area after the front page, will reflect news from local newspapers.

Regardless of the fact that considerable traffic gets redirected to competition from its own portal, Scott Moore, head of Yahoo’s media group, states that the aim is to “aggregate and program the best content around the Web.”

Another application that will be open in a few weeks is Yahoo music, which connects to a radio service, and will users will be able to buy albums from Amazon and iTunes.

According to Moore, although the move does not result in a direct financial benefit for Yahoo, the focus is on better user experience for the consumers and partners.

Talking about the relevance of open to partners and advertisers Hillary Schneider, executive vice president of Yahoo US, said, ”Open advertising aggregates valuable audiences removing friction in the buying process, increasing campaign effectiveness and benefits for publishers.”

According to Schneider,”12.5 billion of the local advertising content will go online by 2010.”

With reference to Yahoo’s proposed advertising partnership with Google, Scheider said it would lead to a "better consumer experience." The company plans to go ahead with the deal, despite concerns from the US Department of Justice, which appears to oppose the partnership citing anti-trust violation.

Web on the Go!
Another huge focus area for the company is its open mobile strategy. “Open is a necessity in mobile. The mobile operation is massive and the mission is to enable a mobile ecosystem for billions of users,” said Marco Borries, head of the mobile division.

Yahoo is using a three-pronged strategy to -create an open mobile platform to make development easy; launch a mobile monetization engine and build indispensable mobile services for people.

According to Borries, Blueprint, Yahoo’s mobile platform, is not just another mobile OS, neither proprietary nor limited to Yahoo!. “Blueprint is faster development time with a powerful feature set, Location based services, mapping controls, device optimization, open and cross platforms.”

Yahoo Go! a mobile application enables users to connect to various other sites as widgets be it Gmail, MSN or Facebook located as widgets within Yahoo!

The company has tied up with cellular service providers AT&T in the US and Reliance Communications in India to provide mobile services.
To engage the iPhone fans, Yahoo! One Connect an open communications platform for iPhone socially connects users from any site. 
The company intends to create mobile applications to run on devices containing platforms such as Java, Windows Mobile, and Symbian.
According to Borries,” This in turn will result in a lot of content coming into the mobile space”. Rather than create another OS this enables us to open our platform for others to create, he said.

In an attempt to bring in a ‘cinematic Internet experience’ Yahoo in partnership with Intel, has enabled a fifth generation of the Yahoo widget engine to run on TV. The widget gallery, which can include widgets from other sites, can be transported on to television with a User Interface. “Its not about customizing a web browser to a television screen,” says Borries, but about providing different functionalities.

The new redesigned yahoo is scheduled to be launched in a few weeks.

Yahoo! hosted the writer in Sunnyvale, California!