• Cnet News.com, Friday, September 12, 2008 11:30 AM

Yahoo has seen the future, and the future is, unsurprisingly, "open." On Thursday, Yahoo officials detailed plans for the Yahoo Open Strategy, demonstrating how its new development platform allows content and services providers to distribute their products on the company's sites.

Ash Patel, Yahoo's head of audience products, demonstrated a new Netflix application allowing Yahoo users to engage with its video rental store on Yahoo's home page, search, and Web mail. The app showed Patel the movies he has ordered, along with his current wish list, which he could add to, and recommendations. "Yahoo allows developers to create applications for the world's biggest audience," Patel said. "By engaging developers to create experiences we can get the right experiences across the Web and bring those experiences into the Yahoo front page." Indeed, why go anywhere else on the Web?

A day earlier, Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh addressed members of the press at the company's Open Hack Day 2008, in which about 300 programmers came to see what they could do with the company's development platform, giving them, for example, the opportunity to retool the company's home page. As Balogh said, what's essential on the home page is different for different users.

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