Yahoo Introduces Y!OS, opens up itself!

Yahoo recently launched what is called "Rewriting of Yahoo", Y!OS: Yahoo! Open Strategy. The strategy is to open up everything to developers including content,traffic and Yahoo's user base. Developers will be able to use all the open assets, build application on them and even display them on their web site. The platform is being introduced with the introduction of social suite or more popularly Social API.

Y!OS is built on three things:

• Yahoo! Social Platform
• Yahoo! Query Language
• Yahoo! Application Platform

The social platform enables yahoo users to experience the socializing of web. Yahoo has been experimenting with web socialization using Y!360 and then Mash. But both of this products did not click. The new platform will aggregate relationships in Mail, Messenger, Address Book, and other social areas of Yahoo! to recommend connections to our users. For this Yahoo profiles is also revamped! For developers, all these profile data will be accessible using RESTful APIs.

YQL is the single point entry for developers to query, filter and combine data from Yahoo. It will provide SQL like statements in its query language. Apart from this developers will also have access to RSS and HTML pages to get information. You can get more information from YQL documentation.

YAP brings the front end! It will allow the developers to easily author and publish application across Yahoo network. developers will have Java script, server side scripting (YML) and flash at their disposal for developing applications. These application can be easily embedded into Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Front Page etc. This is many made possible using Yahoo's SearchMonkey platform.

All in all, yahoo is opening up like Google, integrating applications available for users and basically socializing. But I see most of these things are already available with Google. So will these platforms give Google a competition?