The Future of Web 3.0 According to Yahoo!

The Future of Web 3.0 According to Yahoo!

Written by Lidija Davis / October 18, 2008 5:01 AM

At the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo in Santa Clara today, Dave Beckett (principal software architect at Yahoo!) and Tom Hughes-Croucher (technical evangelist, Yahoo! Developer Network), answered questions about the recent consumer release of Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) and discussed the company's future plans to open up almost everything.

"The open source, hacker attitude has been part of our culture for so long; now we're opening up the different pieces," Hughes-Croucher told the packed room yesterday. "We're taking data from across our sites and sharing it."

Dubbed the 'rewiring of Yahoo,' Y!OS 1.0 launched this week with the introduction of the social suite. Its strategy focuses on opening up almost everything to developers, including content, traffic, and Yahoo's user base.

Y!OS: What It Means to Developers

When asked what type of data will be available to developers, Hughes-Croucher said that Yahoo's strength is in historical data which can be accessed, assessed, and used to make the user experience better; the caveat of course is: with the users permission.

"If we use this data and grid computing to process the data, we don't need to ask you to import your address book - we already know that information," added Beckett. "At the end of the day though, this is your data."

But it's not just about user data, he says, search data is coming into it as well, via searchmonkey.

To make things simple for everyday developers, the Yahoo! duo told the audience they are concentrating on APIs for sites like Flickr and Delicious. "Of course, there are other technologies, like Yahoo! Query Language (YQL), the next generation of Yahoo Pipes, that brings ease of use to query language," says Hughes-Croucher....