Yahoo! breaks down its 'garden walls' and lets developers in

Yahoo!! has already launched its new profiles site. This week phase two, when web developers can start sinking their teeth into Yahoo!'s attempt to replace its present static design with one that's customisable, application-rich, socially connected, and woven into other parts of the internet.

Developers are essential to what the company calls the Yahoo! Open Strategy. Yahoo! is building the foundation but it will be the arrival of others' applications that will show whether Yahoo!'s transformation attempt is fulfilling those hopes.

"That starts changing Yahoo! from a walled garden to the best of the web," said Ash Patel, executive vice president of Yahoo!'s Audience Product Division, speaking to reporters at Yahoo!'s Brickhouse site on Friday. Patel has a heavy burden: in his new role, he's responsible for a major part of Yahoo!'s attempt to reverse its fortunes amid a rough economy.

If the strategy works, more people will use Yahoo!, and they'll use it more deeply. Patel said: "We should see a lot more time spent and bigger engagement with the front page and mail and My Yahoo!. The average Yahoo! user who may use two or three things [today] will now start using four or five or six things."

Applications using the Yahoo! foundation can run at Yahoo! or outside it, and Yahoo! will release a software developer kit to help programmers get started.

For example, when a commenter is posting on a publisher's website, the publisher could offer the commenter an option to have that activity broadcast on his stream of activity on Yahoo!. That would let the commenter share what he's up to with his contacts while exposing the publisher's site to more potential readers.

Another example - indeed, the winner of the Yahoo! Open Hack 2008 programming contest augmented Yahoo! Mail to present all photos a person has sent or received into photo albums. More photos are shared daily on Yahoo! than are uploaded to the company's Flickr photo-sharing site, Patel said, so moves like this could open new windows of activity on Yahoo! properties.

Yahoo! has opened some developer-oriented projects already, notably Boss (Build your own search service) for repackaging Yahoo! search results, and SearchMonkey for adding new depth to Yahoo!'s search results, but those were narrower in scope. At some point this week the more powerful tools will go live at the Yahoo! Developer Network.

There are three broad categories of technology that developers will get access to. At the base is a social platform that applications can use to draw upon Yahoo! users' social connections. While sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace capitalised on the social-networking phenomenon, Yahoo! argues it already has the social data built into its properties. It's now a matter of bringing it to the fore so applications and users can draw on that information.

"The idea is to create a single social experience that can be shared," said Jay Rossiter, head of the Yahoo! Open Strategy.

One level above the social plumbing is the foundation for running applications, called the Yahoo! Application Platform. Initially, Yahoo! will house standalone applications, but as third parties' products mature, they'll also be able to run on Yahoo! users' profile pages, My Yahoo! pages, and other locations.

And the third level is the services level. Here, Yahoo! provides the Yahoo! Query Language, a close relative to the Structured Query Language many use to extract data from databases. YQL is designed to make it easier for programmers to extract and process data from Yahoo! and many other websites, and Yahoo! says it'll do the heavy lifting to make the data workable through YQL.

Yahoo! doesn't want any privacy surprises, though. Each new application must declare to the user exactly what Yahoo! services it wants to use and must obtain the users' permission to do so.

Original article: Yahoo to expose its wiring to developers next week from CNET News.com