Yahoo! to open up more technologies?
By Michael W. Jones
Yahoo! said late last week that it was considering opening up access to a wider range of corporate technologies than just search, building upon a popular program from last year. The hope was then, and is now, that opening up previously proprietary technologies could lead to innovation from sources outside the company, specifically startups with new ideas built around those technologies.
The technologies to be shared could even include Flickr, the company’s popular photo sharing and social networking Web site. As reported by PC World, Andrei Z. Broder, vice president for computational advertising, announced that Yahoo! would be opening up more of it’s technology to outside developers and companies. Although Broder said that the list of technologies to be made available is still speculative, Flickr was specifically mentioned.
Earlier this year, in what may now be viewed as a pilot program, Yahoo! announced the Build Your Own Search Engine (BOSS) program. The BOSS program granted access to Yahoo!’s previously proprietary search infrastructure and algorithms, essentially allowing third parties to build specialized search engines on the foundations of Yahoo! search. This program has apparently led to some success and the basic concept may be extended to other Yahoo! technologies.
It has always been Yahoo!’s plan to make available the innovations arising from these programs to other program participants, and perhaps more broadly. At the same time, Yahoo! hopes to help smaller companies and startups invent better ways of performing searches and improving other services without the need to invest in the development of new processes and technology internally.
With rumors of a Microsoft-Yahoo! deal still circulating widely, one has to wonder what Microsoft thinks of this idea. The Redmond software giant is not exactly known for its generosity in the area of open source. Could an announcement that Yahoo! was planning to give away things that Microsoft was willing to buy be intended to goad Microsoft into making a deal more quickly in order to keep these technologies private?
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