Marc's Voice

We’re creating a culture of generosity

This is Jeff Weiner. It appears that this guy is shepherding in a whole new era of functionality in search engines and social networking.

If I get the Yahoo announcement correctly - they’ve developed an underlying social networking platform - which Yahoo 360 utilizes as well as My Web 2.0.

That means that……..

Oh man ooh man - my head is hurting!

Open social networking APIs from Yahoo. Or at least the beginnings of that with exposing this new search engine of theirs - via open APIs.

So no not yet - they haven’t opened up the entire social network - but I believe they’ll get there. Currently the My Web 2.0 APIs enable:

- listFolders
- listURLs
- urlSearch
- tagSearch
- relatedTags

But to make this really functional I’m hoping that access to members themselves and what they’ve rated, ranked, tagged, etc. - will also be necessary.

They asked me to tell them what I thought and here goes:

I hope that they support the basic PeopleAggregator APIs, which are:

- establish a relationship (more than just zero/one (friend or no friend) - but multiple levels of relationships

- send a message

- join or create a Group (yes - that’s currently missing from the Yahoo platform - but it’s coming)

- post a ___________ to _____________ (this is for micro-content publishing - to anywhere) (see ReBlg - soon to be renamed BTW)

This will provide the ability for disparate social nets to mesh together. Needless to say - that’s key.

So I kept my mouth shut, I didn’t say anything (except for my excited anticipatory exclamation!) and now we can get on with it.

Is it a coicidence that the same day:

- I met with SixApart
- Google announces coolio more features for maps (including tying into Craigslist for apartment listings!)
- Yahoo announces mail with the ODDpost features
- It’s opening day for the Gillmor Gang on iPods (hhmmm - maybe i get to be on again - before New Year’s Eve?)
- John Markoff writes “Web Content by and for the Masses“
- even though Jeremy Z is on vacation - he HAD to get his licks in…

Caterina got to announce it first - BTW.