Yahoo! Developer Network Blog

Introducing Y!OS 1.0 - live today!

Earlier this month, we introduced a revamped universal profile to all Yahoo! users – but that was just the tip of the iceberg. With the new profile page, you got a peek at our open vision, but today’s Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) 1.0 platform launch gives you something to get your hands on. Today we’re making Y!OS a reality for developers through the release of the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) , Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP) and Yahoo! Query Language (YQL). Now, anyone on the web has access to Yahoo!’s tools and data to start building applications for Yahoo!’s vast audience and the web beyond.

Yahoo! Social Platform
The Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP) consists of a suite of REST-based social APIs from Yahoo! including: Profiles, Connections, Updates, Contacts and Status. These services will make it possible for you to write social applications either on Yahoo! using the Application Platform or on your own website. We are releasing a PHP SDK an a Flash SDK to help you access these web services. Because we make use of standard OAuth and REST (both XML and JSON), standard libraries can also be used.

Yahoo! Query Language (YQL)
YQL is a new web service API that lets you access other web services using a SQL-like language rather than typical programmatic access. You can think of it as a command line version of Pipes. Its goal is to make data from Yahoo! as well as from across the internet universally accessible through a single common interface.

Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP)
YAP will soon become the mechanism for distributing your application to millions of users on Yahoo!’s homepages, media sites, and mail properties, some of the most trafficked sites on the Internet. The initial release supports a few programming models including:
- Developer hosted execution of applications with access to Yahoo's Social APIs and YQL;
- Support for OpenSocial's JavaScript API; and
- Support for server-side YML tags.

Today we are launching the platform itself; for now, we hope you’ll start building apps to view in the canvas view. We will keep you updated on the rollout schedule for embedding third-party applications within the pages of Yahoo!'s properties. In the meantime we’d love to hear from you and see what you’re building.

Yahoo! values user security and privacy. We've put several mechanisms in place to keep YAP secure, so that people are always in control of the data they put into the system:
- All HTML, CSS & JS code will be run through Caja . Check the release notes for what capabilities are supported;
- Users have the option of not sharing their data with their connections applications;
- Spam protection is in place around messaging, invites, and updates.

OAuth
YAP, YSP, and YQL are all accessed using the open standard OAuth to authenticate both the developer and the 3rd-party (user) on whose behalf the developer is accessing the data. This ensures that our users are always in control over who can access their data.

What’s next?

In 2008, it’s been all about building the base platform. For the rest of the year and into 2009, we’ll focus on integrating the platform into rest of Yahoo!. As we rewire Yahoo! in this way, you’ll see two major things start to happen:

1. Users will begin to experience what we call a “social dimension” across Yahoo!.

We’ll activate our network horizontally across Yahoo!. Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger will encourage users to connect with the people that they care the most about. For example, Mail will incentivize connections by enabling users to filter their inboxes to see emails just from social connections. And Mail, Messenger, the front page of Yahoo!, and My Yahoo! will allow people to see things their connections have been doing across Yahoo! and the web. Finally, Yahoo!’s media properties (Sports, Music) will contribute to social relevancy by encouraging users to share experiences with each other.

2. We’ll continue to open Yahoo! to developers and publishers like never before.

By opening up, we create experiences that give people choice about the content they consume. We’re committed to giving our users what they want, where and with whom they want it. We’ll continue opening the UI of places like My Yahoo!, the Yahoo! homepage (www.yahoo.com), and Mail to 3rd party applications via YAP, so our users gain access to the best and liveliest of the web. And our Social Platform APIs give developers across the web the tools and data services to create rich experiences for this newly active social user base. You’ll be able to publish activity stream information via Updates and reach users across the Front Page, Messenger and Yahoo! Mail.

This launch also marks Yahoo!’s first implementation of OpenSocial support. As a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation, Yahoo! is committed to supporting the complete OpenSocial specification and is working with the community to expand the spec to include OSML and OpenSocial templates. In addition, we are currently implementing a Shindig-based OpenSocial container which will allow us to provide full support for the OpenSocial REST Protocols and thus for Portable Contacts. To learn more about YAP and OpenSocial, please visit the OpenSocial blog.

Developers everywhere benefit from the fact that Yahoo!'s audience is worldwide. Our platform is fully internationalized from the start for use in 31 countries. And we’re growing. Come along and go global with Yahoo!.