Yahoo! Opens Up to Developers

Today Yahoo! officially introduced their "open strategy" platform, Y!OS. The Yahoo! Open Strategy platform consists of three development components, the Yahoo! Application Platform, the Yahoo! Social Platform, and the Yahoo! Query Language.

Yahoo! is encouraging developers to start working with these tools, and promises to soon provide information on supplying newly created applications within Yahoo!'s pages.

Yahoo! Social Platform is a group of social APIs that allows developers to use Yahoo! tools and data to build applications for use on Yahoo! and their own personal websites.

Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) is an API that allows developers to access information across sites and web services that is more akin to using SQL commands than it is a typical "programming" language.

Yahoo! Application Platform is the actual method of application delivery -- a repository that works in theory much the same way the Google Code pages do. It supports developer hosted applications that work with the Yahoo! Social and YQL APIs, as well as the OpenSocial JavaScript API. Yahoo! Application Platform also has implemented spam protection, and offers users the option to disallow the sharing of information with any connecting applications (using OAuth).

This, Yahoo! says, is only the beginning. The rest of this year and next will focus on rolling out and further integrating the open features (and developed applications) Yahoo!-wide. Yahoo! is one of the founders of the OpenSocial Foundation and this is its first formal implementation of OpenSocial support. From here, Yahoo! plans to do more to open its platform, from developer tools to portable contacts.