Yahoo To Rewire for Social Network with Open Strategy

Yahoo plans to rewire itself to bring a latent social network to the surface using an Open Strategy announced at the Web 2.0 conference. Yahoo said an app written for one Yahoo property will be able to integrate with other properties and with the extended social network. Yahoo already supports the OpenSocial standards for sharing with other sites.

Yahoo may resemble islands of Web properties, but the company is launching a renovation that could turn it into one huge platform. On Thursday, Yahoo announced its Open Strategy at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

"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.

'Latent Social Network'

Open Strategy invites 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.

Sample also noted that, with 500 million unique users spending 235 billion minutes each month on its sites, and with 10 billion relationships in buddy lists and Yahoo address books, the company has "a massive, latent social network." The new initiative, he added, will "bring it to the surface."

In other words, he told news media, Yahoo is not building another social network, but "building social into everything we do."

He described it as a "rewiring" of Yahoo by building structures that change how its pieces work together. He said developers will be able to take advantage of the "vitality" that will exist within this unified platform. An application written for a Yahoo property will be able to integrate with other properties and with the extended social network.

Example: Search Monkey

An example is Yahoo's Search Monkey, where developers can blend other data with search results so that, for instance, an Italian restaurant could have reviews and ratings along with the link to its Web site. Search Monkey officially launches in mid-May.

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."

Social networks, she said, will at some point become "like air," with no boundaries between friends or work colleagues, regardless of where their personal network is based.

In March, Yahoo announced support for OpenSocial standards so that applications created by developers for Yahoo will also work on MySpace, Google and other sites accepting OpenSocial.

Li wrote that she does not see Open Strategy as a "Hail Mary pass" from Yahoo to counter Microsoft's efforts to acquire the company. She added that it's only a matter of time before Google, Facebook and other sites respond to the huge social environment and social driver that Yahoo can become.

"Open" has had a major emphasis by Yahoo recently. Earlier this month, for instance, it released an online advertising-management platform for businesses that includes an open set of application-programming interfaces, or APIs.

Also this month, Yahoo released a new version of its oneSearch technology for mobile devices, which it described as "an open technology platform."

Source: www.newsfactor.com

Yahoo Live tries livestreaming

Last night, Yahoo dropped a new service on the world: the livestreaming service Yahoo Live. Conceptually it's very much like uStream and other livestream products. Anyone can set up a channel and embed the live player (though, oddly, not the text chat that goes with it) on their own page.

One of the really cool features of Yahoo Live is its multi-camera viewing panel. In addition to the video feed you tune in to, four other video channels -- of other users watching the same stream you are -- appear below the main video. You can jump to those channels quickly, and change the lineup of the secondary video channels by selecting names from the main video's chat window.

Yahoo is launching the service with an API, allowing people to mash up their own streaming video services. That's very cool, and unusually forthcoming. Most services don't go public with APIs, if ever, until the site has been live for a little while.

Unfortunately, Yahoo Live launched with a serious capacity deficit. I had the service go from functional to "our servers are smoking" several times when the user count broke about 800. Hey Yahoo: this is why the private beta was invented. If you don't want to put Yahoo-sized capacity into a new product, don't pretend that it's ready for a public viewing.

No word yet on how Google / YouTube will react, nor if a mobile version will appear.

See also: Justin.TV, Kyte, Qik, Flixwagon, Comvu, Mogulus and Operator11. Care to lay odds on which, if any, can survive independently, or which will get acquired by Google, Facebook or MySpace?

Track Yahoo Live's progress on the site's blog.

Source: www.msn.com

Yahoo! and the future of the Internet

The openness of the Internet is what made Google -- and Yahoo! -- possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It's what makes the Internet such an exciting place.

So Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft -- despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses -- to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions -- and consumers deserve satisfying answers.

This hostile bid was announced on Friday, so there is plenty of time for these questions to be thoroughly addressed. We take Internet openness, choice and innovation seriously. They are the core of our culture. We believe that the interests of Internet users come first -- and should come first -- as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored.

Source: www.Google.com

Yahoo! Gets More Social with Applications for Bebo

Socializing isn't quite what it used to be. For many people, it's no longer just about catching up with your pals at an evening happy hour; it's also about staying connected to a wider group by using the web as a networking tool. Not only do social networking sites help keep us in contact with connections near and far, they also make it easy for us to share our daily lives, interests and personality with friends and family. And today, Yahoo! UK & Ireland is helping to improve the socializing experience for users on the leading UK social networking site, Bebo, with the integration of Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Music.

With the addition of Yahoo! Answers to Bebo's new application platform, Bebo users are now able to tap into each other's knowledge and expertise, benefiting themselves, their friends and the wider Yahoo! Answers community of millions of users. Bebo users can publish and share their Q&As with their friends and promote their reputation and participation in the Yahoo! Answers community via a module displayed on their user profile. They can also ask and answer questions directly within Bebo, and view Q&As from their Bebo friends.

We've also launched three new Yahoo! Music video channels -- Top Music, Rock and Urban -- so users can subscribe to the latest videos or add their favorite songs to their Bebo profile for all their friends to enjoy.

By making Yahoo! products and services more accessible off of the Yahoo! Network, we hope you find it easier to interact and share interests with your own communities. Don't forget to let us know what you think by commenting here.

Source: www.yahoo.com

Yahoo's CAPTCHA Security Reportedly Broken

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) may soon see a surge in spam coming from Yahoo Mail accounts.

"John Wane," who identifies himself as a Russian security researcher, has posted software that he claims can defeat the CAPTCHA system Yahoo uses to prevent automated registration of free Yahoo Mail accounts.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It's a technique that presents an image depicting distorted text that people, but not machines, can identify.

Large e-mail service providers like Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), and Yahoo present CAPTCHA images to users signing up for new accounts to make sure that there's a real person behind the registration information. These companies do so to discourage spammers from using automated methods to register thousands of free online accounts to send spam.

CAPTCHAs are also used to prevent spam in blogs and other online forums, automated ballot stuffing for online polls, and automated password guessing attacks.

"Few months ago, we received information that [a] Yahoo CAPTCHA recognition system exists in the wild with the recognition rate about 30%," Wane says in a blog post. "So we decided to conduct few experiments. We explored Yahoo CAPTCHA and designed a similar system with even better recognition rate (about 35%)."

Various automated methods exist to defeat CAPTCHA schemes but the CAPTCHAs used by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have remained difficult for computers to crack.

If the software works as advertised, and it's not clear that it does, it could force Yahoo and other companies to spend yet more money to defend against spammers.

"We are aware of attempts being made toward automated solutions for CAPTCHA images and continue to work on improvements as well as other defenses," a Yahoo spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.

John Orbeton, strategic product manager for IronPort, said that if the software works, "it could be used for spam. It could be used for phishing. It depends on the motivation of the attacker." The claimed rate of success, 35%, he said, "could create a fairly significant number of e-mail accounts."

It is ironic, Orbeton added, that image-recognition technology, which is being used to defend against the current generation of image spam, should be used by spammers to create more spam.

Not that there's any shortage of the stuff. "In 2007 we saw spam volumes increase 100%," Orbeton said. "That comes out to around 20 spam messages per day for everyone on the planet, whether they have e-mail or not."

Source: www.informationweek.com