Yahoo’s London Hack Weekend: APIs Rule OK

imageSome Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) top brass including co-founder David Filo and senior product management director Cody Simms took time out from the company’s recent travails for Yahoo’s Open Hack in Covent Garden this weekend. After launching its Open Strategy last year, it was an opportunity for Yahoo to encourage some 250 third-party developers to create new services based on Yahoo components (here are the fruits of the weekend). I caught up with LA-based Simms to find out why a business in such turmoil puts third-party development so high on its priority list…

Too many products?: Critics say Yahoo already has too many services. CEO Carol Bartz is widely thought to be considering cutting the product portfolio, so isn’t inviting developers to create still more services just adding to the problem? Simms: “Our company overall is absolutely looking at our product portfolio and making sure that we put our best foot forward and take care of the products that we’re really strategically invested in.” As for third-party projects – they’ll be “integrated with Yahoo overall” rather than standalone properties.

Well-meaning APIs aside, where’s the money? “Each service that we release may have different business goals” – but Simms says the overall goal is “to increase engagement across the network”, helping users find what they want. “By opening the data APIs, it allows membership in Yahoo to have more value.” For example, the Updates API allows tools to be created that show a user’s recent web activity such as blog posts and social network updates.

Staff shortage: Yahoo has had its fair share of staff cuts in the past year — the most recent will see five percent of the workforce culled. Is an emphasis on low-cost, third-party development an attempt to re-capture the innovation following the departure of some key developers, such as those from Flickr recently? Simms says: “I don’t think that’s the motivation at all, actually. We realised that the web is big and open itself and the users want to get the information they want. And if that information is something that Yahoo natively provided and develops, then we want them to be able to pull that from any source on the web.”

Universal sign-in: Simms says that the company has been “opening up the login platform” through the OpenID scheme, which allows users to create a single unified log-in for their web needs, and Open Auth, which manages what personal data users want to allow sites to access and is integrated with several APIs.

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