Yahoo! Issues Call for Homepage Apps, Plugs Proprietary Development Platform
The Yahoo! Developer Network blog has a post today calling for "innovative and flawless" applications to be submitted for inclusion in a gallery section on their redesigned homepage.
Apps are to be built using Yahoo!'s proprietary development platform, YAP. The YDN post further noted, "We're working on an array of additional developer monetization opportunities - these will be available soon." The gallery's inaugural class includes YAP-built applications from Mint, Lumosity, Flixter, Target, and WordPress.
The YAP premise is fairly straightforward. Styled "a wide open, self service environment," the platform allows developers to build apps and submit them to Yahoo! with no business development deals or contracts. Developers use their own environments, stacks, and servers and code in any language they like. For the developers, the benefit is instant distribution. For Yahoo!, the benefit is a ton of free R&D and IP.
For users, the benefit is a slew of widgets to make the Yahoo! portal more intensely personal, whether that experience is one of entertainment, education, practicality, socialization, or information. The apps pop into a lightbox-style layout, called "Small View," on scrollover and go to a full-page "Canvas View" when a user clicks through.
Yahoo! has made conscious and ever-increasing efforts to open themselves to the developer community in what many see as a struggle to remain interesting and viable in the age of the open API. Tools such as YQL, their proprietary query language which we covered in depth, and their YAP application development platform help to foster a sense of relevancy for the aging web giant.
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I am going to give some free advice to my former Yahoo colleagues here.
When somebody asks me to build an application for them for free and they insist that it be "innovative and flawless," my first reaction is to say "bite me, I'm not your sharecropper."
If you follow up with a laundry list of applications that are already running on your platform, it means that you're confused about your audience and your call to action. The ideal platform for developers is one with a billion users, zero existing applications, and unlimited restrictions on what you can build and monetize. That's not the message I'm getting here, and "coming soon" simply doesn't cut it.
P.S. Dudes, your platform offering is confusing enough without your insistence on abbreviating everything. I still can't remember what "YAP" is supposed to stand for. Can anyone, outside of Yahoo?
"bite me, I'm not your sharecropper."
Well, my comment got clipped, but the gist of it was: I can't say that bit if Jeffrey's comment didn't make me laugh.
**HUGE** thumbs down to the new Yahoo home page. It’s awkward, a step backwards (looks like its previous iteration a few years ago) and takes more steps now to do anything than it did before. Boo! to the re-design. I hope they let me keep the old one. It’s enough to make me finally end my decade long love affair with yahoo.
"I hope they let me keep the old one."
Then keep it and they will see that you and maybe some other people are keeping it. I kind of like the prior iteration better too. I still use Yahoo as my "start page."
Jeffrey, don't build them an app if you don't want to. Or . . . submit one to them that is non-innovative and filled with flaws if you think that's what they should be asking for from developers.