Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Yahoo goes Social with Paas Offering

Well, no time to really expound on this, but I thought it was important to highlight: Yahoo! announced a PaaS offering at Web 2.0, and it is yet another interesting twist on a theme. The best overview I found is a video of Yahoo! CTO Ari Balogh's keynote at Web2.0.

What sets Yahoo!'s offering apart (at least in theory--it isn't all delivered yet) is the focus on turning all of Yahoo's properties, services and content into:
  1. An open API based mash-up ready smorgasbord of development opportunity, complete with development environment and optional hosting in their infrastructure.
  2. A completely interconnected social network that differentiates itself by being a feature, not a destination. This, for me, is a wise move on Yahoo's part, as no one else is willing to say their network is simply a part of the overall user experience of a destination, rather than being a destination that users must conciously choose to navigate to to use its advantages.

I think Yahoo! is looking at an interesting play, though you have to wonder how they will steal developer mind-share from Microsoft and Google--that is, unless they become either Microsoft or Google...

More in the next few days when I have time. Till then, stop by my main page to check out what I am reading on a day-to-day basis, with some commentary. You can comment yourself on my page at FriendFeed.

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