One of the more ambitious projects in the works when I left Yahoo was BOSS, a more open Yahoo! Search for developers and publishers. I see that BOSS launched today and wanted to say congrats to my friends in the Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo! Search.
Marshall Kirkpatrick said it well in his ReadWrite Web post today:
It is clear, though, that BOSS falls well within the company's overall technical strategy of openness. When it comes to web standards, openness and support for the ecosystem of innovation - there may be no other major vendor online as strong as Yahoo! is today. These are times of openness, where some believe that no single vendor's technology and genius alone can match the creativity of an empowered open market of developers. Yahoo! is positioning itself as leader of this movement.
Well done.
Keep on pushing...
Posted by jzawodn at July 10, 2008 07:26 AM
This is very exciting news. Obviously this is a very tenuous analogy, but I'm sort of reminded of MSFT/Apple strategy lines by this move.
Google (a la Apple) has a better product but (as far as tinkering with search by outsiders goes) it is hermetically sealed. Yahoo (a la MSFT) is going to try to leverage the rest of the world's developers to expand its reach, potentially building their own set of "productivity search engines" that are the best examples of this (a la MS Office).
I look forward to people destroying this analogy, which I'm sure is deeply flawed.
Also, I'm going to post this on my blog too.
BOSS certainly does look very interesting...look forward to experimenting with it. Great move on Yahoo's part!
Just a thought but you might want to update the link to your "current" employer in your blog disclaimer. Somewhat belated congrats on the new gig!
BTW, I noted that one of our users said that Interclue was an awesome add-on for use with Craigslist. Give it a try if you get a chance, and ping me if you have any feedback.
Cheers,
Seth.