Yahoo allows outsiders to innovate on Yahoo e-mail
Yahoo Inc. is set to allow outsiders to create new services using the world's most popular consumer e mail program, in the broadest move the Web has yet seen to enlist independent programmers to build a company's products for it.
Officials of the world's largest Internet media company said on Friday it planned to give away the underlying code to Yahoo Mail, one of the crown jewels of its business, in a bid to encourage software developers to build new applications based on e mail.
The move to open up the underlying code of Yahoo Mail used by 257 million people is designed to spark development of thousands of new e mail applications built not only by Yahoo engineers but by outside companies and individuals.
Chad Dickerson, head of the Sunnyvale company's software developer relations program, said he believed that the open approach to programming represented the biggest single Web software ever to be opened up for public development.
"Yahoo is a very large company but we can't build every applications that a user might want," Dickerson said in an interview at Yahoo headquarters. "You can imagine tens of thousands of niche applications (springing) from Yahoo Mail."
Software developers have traditionally kept careful control of the underlying programming code of their products and allowed outsiders to make only incremental improvements. In recent years, Web developers have opened up that process to encourage outsiders far deeper access to the underlying code.
Open applications like Google Maps and Yahoo's own Flickr have inspired a new wave of programming in which developers can combine software features from different companies to create what are known as "mashups" hybrid Web products.
The company made the announcement ahead of a 24 hour "Yahoo Hack Day", where it has invited more than 500 most youthful outside programmers to build new applications using Yahoo services. Hack is used in its original sense of "creative programming" not illicit sense of breaking into computers.
"Hack Day" mixes Web programming competitions, overnight slumber party and a music festival where pop music superstar Beck has been hired to play a concert on the Yahoo campus.
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