Y! OS Finally Announced

Last year, my team was working in the Platform division and working on creating the social media platform for Yahoo! This included components related to identity, how a person is identified across the yahoo! network, reputation, relationships and something we call vitality - a person’s updates and lifestream of activity across the network or internet.

Midway in the year, we started working on concepts for off-network release of these ideas and this became known internally as our Open Strategy. We worked for weeks with some great product and technical strategists and developed interesting user stories to sell the idea up the chain.
Eventually, the Open Strategy and many of the concepts we developed became part of our corporate big bets - Y!OS is #3 and this in turn helped instigate a reorganization and realignment of the company. Matt Leacock is leading the way from the interaction design and system wide design perspective.

Neil Sample, our chief strategic architect for the open strategy gave a great deep dive talk about Y!OS at Web 2.0. This video shares the vision and details more of the concepts of the architecture for how developers will be able to build on Yahoo! and the types of APIs that will be available off Yahoo! that tap into our amazing breadth and wealth of user data - most specifically the results of the social design work we were doing last year.

I am proud to have been part of the early process of Y! OS and now to be part of the team that will be helping to evangelize and spread the word about the amazing things we have to offer a wide array of developers and publishers out there. As part of the ongoing rollout this year of the Y! OS parts, we will be publishing related interaction design patterns and best practices to accompany the developer APIs and documentation.

Keep your eyes open and check design.yahoo.com periodically.