In Praise of Y!OS

Posted 1 year, 10 months ago at 10:23 pm. 0 comments

I have been following how Yahoo’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) has been progressing with a lot of interest. The timing of this post of course couldn’t be worse as Yahoo plans to cut a part of its workforce this week (I am even more concerned since I have a couple of friends at Yahoo and I hope they are okay). But that aside, Yahoo’s new direction with opening up their platform to developers seems to have a lot of potential. Couple that with Yahoo’s very mash-friendly api’s for their properties like Flickr, Maps, Shopping and of course their new search platform, BOSS, and there seem to be enough elements there to make the new Yahoo really interesting. And lets not forget, Yahoo is building Y!OS completely on open source tech and already has a bunch of developers using their open source libraries like the YUI library as well as all the code they have been releasing on their developer centers.

As a developer, its really amazing to see Yahoo putting its future in the hands of developers. There is some aspect of relinquishing control over to the external developers there that I imagine must have been a hard sell.

A nice writeup on Y!OS can be found on Mashable here. In the meanwhile here is an interesting video on Y!OS: