• TechCrunch, Friday, April 25, 2008 11:45 AM

Yahoo is taking the bold new step of completely drinking the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid: The Internet giant will is opening up its Web services to developers and link its platforms together in an attempt to get users to interact with the site more like a social network. Yahoo has been moving in this direction for some time, having introduced social media features to its Web mail, joining Google's Open Social initiative and introducing Search Monkey, a new social search initiative.

There are three components to the company's so-called Yahoo Open Strategy: Platformization, opening services and portability. Platformization is a movement to make the overall Yahoo experience more social by linking each of its many services to a single user profile. Yahoo mail will be the focal point of that experience to which friend lists and activity feeds will be added.

Opening Yahoo's services is an extension of the Web firm's commitment to OpenSocial. Through the Google-led initiative, developers will have access to a common set of APIs, but Yahoo will also layer its own APIs on top of OpenSocial to allow deeper integration with Yahoo services. Yahoo will also let developers use their bandwidth, storage, database and CPU resources to host their applications through Yahoo's Application Platform, which like Google App Engine, will be free up to a point. Finally, Yahoo will allow its services (including their user data) to be ported outside of the Yahoo ecosystem.

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