Yahoo Open

On Friday, 300 programmers will descend upon Sunnyvale, Calif., to plant the seeds of what Yahoo hopes will be an answer to Google's Internet might.

The event is called Open Hack Day 2008, and at it the coders will be the first from outside the company to get their hands on a number of programming interfaces Yahoo is releasing in an attempt to enliven its stodgy but still powerful Internet properties.

There's no guarantee that the release, a key step in what the company calls its Yahoo Open Strategy, will improve Yahoo's financial misfortunes. But it holds promise a strategy that could help Yahoo without having to try to out-Google Google.

That's because YOS marries the best of what Yahoo is with the best of what's happening on the Internet today. More than 500 million people come to Yahoo sites each month, 300 million of them registered users who log on, and they're coming for Yahoo's content and services. Yahoo may not be able to match Google's search engine and accompanying search ad money machine, but YOS ultimately could help improve Yahoo's assets, attract new partners, and bolster the company's advertising revenue.

"We believe openness is going to happen with or without us. We'd rather be at the center of it," said co-founder David Filo in an interview.

Here's an example of YOS in action that Ash Patel, head of Yahoo's audience products division, showed Thursday. The Yahoo home page, which is being revamped to show content customized for each user, houses an application from Netflix showing the movies a user ordered and new recommendations. Yahoo search is augmented to let people order more movies straight from the search results. And an application within Yahoo Mail could let users rate their movies and chat with Netflix members on their buddy list who've already seen it.

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