Yahoo is doing a LOT of great stuff. 2.0 Stuff.
I’m slowly working on creating some travel related mashups and Yahoo keeps coming up with better and better mapping tools and tools to add travel information to any website. Even restaurants with reviews. Flickr makes it a snap to add pictures to blogs or websites as well as manipulate your own photos. I pointed out how great the Flickr features were to some Picasa developers at Google last month and asked about Picasa integration with websites. They sheepishly replied they were working on it, but I wish my pal Jeremy could have heard that conversation and gloated a bit, because Yahoo’s still not getting anything like the credit they deserve for fully embracing the new web and easily beating Google by most measures in API development.
Google employees do embrace the principles of the new web, but I’m increasingly skeptical that Google can fully promote the openness of the new web and maintain the huge profits they now enjoy. Increasingly profit protection will collide head-on with the old spirit of openness and innovation, and compromises will be made.
The Yahoo 2.0 enabling tools are great stuff and unless I’m really missing comparable things going on at Google, MSN, ASK, and other big players out there it is clearly Yahoo where the really good enabling development has been going on for some time. Yahoo Hack Day is coming soon and they are inviting developers to hang out and camp out down there for hacking and mashing. Open, fun, and free. Neat.
I just hope all this good stuff translates into better press and success. Go Yahoo go.
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Where oh where is the Yahoo! Calendar API? Google clearly has the lead here, and while map “mashups” are what all the cool kids are doing, I haven’t had a single client ask for such a thing. Calendars, contacts, and to-do’s: that’s what I hear requests for. Until Yahoo! opens up APIs to these functions, I’ll continue to build applications against Google. (But Google doesn’t do contacts yet, so Yahoo! has an opportunity to leapfrog them.)
[...] emphasis belongs to me, the insights belong to Gordon though I’ve written about this stuff several times as well though. Yahoo could wind up “owning” 2.0., which is a cool type of ownership where the big guy facilitates millions of long tail, little guy developments and transactions and publishing enterprises. The big guy shares *most* of the revenue with the little guys but the volume creates huge wealth for the big companies and modest wealth for the smaller ones. Users are rewarded with better content, rich interactive experiences, noninvasive advertising, and encyclopedic information. When 2.0 is done right everybody plays, everybody wins. [...]
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