Thursday, April 24, 2008

Yahoo Application Platform (YAP)

At the end of last year, I switched from Yahoo! Profiles (Profiles, 360, Mash) to a new team which I have not been able to tell anyone about other then to say that it was a "platforms team". The past 5 months that I've been with the team has been fun, fast, and very exhausting. We are aiming to do something very different then what Yahoo has done in the past and doing something new that can effect a company the size of Yahoo is not easy especially when it involves steering it away from its traditional course.



After months of work, we're finally able to let the world know the full extent of what we've up to. While we've already announced Yahoo's adoption of Open Social and being a part of the Open Social Foundation, it is only one part of what my team is handling. At the Web 2.0 Summit today, our CTO announced Yahoo's Open Strategy (YOS) which aims to open up Yahoo as a platform. At the heart of it, is the Yahoo Applications Platform (YAP) and that's the group I'm a part of (shown in the above picture as simply APP). Needless to say, it's been a pretty hard pushing 2008 tackling such an ambitious project, but it feel nice to finally be able to let my friends and family know what I work on. :-)



For those interested in what I'm directly involved with from the chart... AppBin/Gallery API, End User Services, Core App API, End-user services, Publisher Services API, END POINTS, droplets, Dropzone DB, and Open Social which all part of the "APP" of the first picture.

And for the person who posted the comment saying that YAP is just vaporware, he should know that Search Monkey has gone into private beta to a select set of developers is built on top of YAP and will have a public launch soon so we're far from being vaporware.

For the many critics of Yahoo that accuses us of not moving, I can only say that while we might not be making splashy daily marketing propaganda that they are a lot of damn serious work being put in by a lot of dedicated engineers to put some serious fire power in the hands of its users.