I read with joy and exultation Jeff Jarvis’ post on Yahoo as a Platform. It seems like Jeff and myself are totally in agreement when it comes to what open platforms are all about.

Jeff has been asking Yahoo to open up and not just copy Facebook’s ‘lock-in’ strategy - which only exposes the user’s social graphs internally. This is exactly what Google is going after - Facebook’s Achilles heel! And Lord knows what MySpace and Friendster’s platform will do about this key issue! At first glance it looks like they’re literally just copying Facebook.

How stupid do these platforms think we are? Don’t they know that users are starting to clue in that THEY own their own data - NOT the platform! Mr. Zuckerberg hides behind the excuse that they’re protecting the privacy of their users - but calling this data FACEBOOK data (in their onerous TOS) exposes the truth of how they really think that all this user data is THEIR data. Well sorry Mark - it ain’t.

So now the question is “how smart is Jerry Yang and his fellow Yahoosters” on this matter? We’re all hoping that Google won’t make the same mistake!

Jeff and I have been trying to get together for six months- every time I get to NYC (like I am right now.) Jeff wanted to rap about the identity space and open standards - but its clear we need to talk about other ’spheres as well.

The blogosphere could use an open standard - sort of like an open MyBlogLog for sharing friends, forming groups and acting like a cross platform blogroll. I really think we also need a universal ‘BlogThis’ button and a way for one to easily route to all their blogging tool destinations (which we call it OutputThis.).

Media standards are far from resolved - with everyone flocking to Flash video (FLV) ever since YouTube showed how seamless video should behave. But we all know that my former company took my idea of a universal multimedia player and turned it into the epitome of closed, proprietary platform. How would the world be different if Flash was an open platform?

Wouldn’t it be coolio if we had an open event-o-sphere, sort of like a shared database of events - eg. EVDB + UpComing + zVents?

I’m really excited about shared reviews and needless to say the new SixApart Relationship Update Stream seems pretty coolio as well.

APML is looming, as are oAuth and there are now demos of the OpenID 2.0 Attribute Exchange.

But what makes it all real is when vendors open up the entire platform as Facebook has done and what MySpace and Friendster now say they’re gonna do. Nov. 5th is a magic date for Google and Microsoft has shown they’re willing to change and offer access to internal Windows Live Contacts user data.

But as Jeff’s post surmises - what about Yahoo? They are the inventors of the personalized web with MyYahoo. But why can’t we access all that MyYahoo data via APIs?

Where’s the Yahoo identity layer? Where’s the access to Yahoo’s social graph data (ooops they just turned off Y!360!) that can be shared between all my Yahoo services and applications - and where are the APIs into that layer?

Isn’t this what Randy Farmer is supposed to be doing?

What is Brad Horowitz doing anyway - besides partying n Hawaii? Maybe Brad will mention it to Jerry - when they’re out golfing or eating roasted whole pig at the Luau - “gee maybe it’s time to open up MyYahoo?”

Yo dudes - GET IT TOGETHER!

Certainly Jeff Jarvis are I think they should. I bet others agree - as well.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.