Mashups are all the rage, the development equivalent of "viral marketing" for better or for worse. Every company that leans on this mantra secretly hopes for the free labor of the development community to launch or re-launch their product into the stratosphere....
Yahoo! is no exception. The announcement that they would open Yahoo! Mail is surprising, but not out of character. Flickr and some of their other acquired products have similar openings. What is interesting is that Yahoo! Mail is a highly successful product, not an 'also-ran' with nothing to lose. By opening it up for innovation, there is a little more risk than if this was a product that had already been relegated to the bottom of the stack.
The announcement precedes a 500 person "Hack Day" on their campus for young programmers, including a free concert from Beck. This makes it even more tied in with a human resources/employee morale approach than simply a development angle.
So is this good or bad if you own shares of Yahoo? Having drunk lots of Web 2.0 Koolaid, I think it's a huge plus. Since the real asset in the email world is the user accounts, opening the functionality doesn't hurt the bottom line as much as potential innovations help it. It draws attention to an otherwise ho-hum product where Yahoo! leads, and forces the hands of competitors who must match or explain why. And if a radical new approach to email emerges from the community, so much the better.
I imagine there are some cons too... managing the change, protecting against hacks and exploits, and finding a way to exploit these developments to some sort of revenue impact are not small challenges...
Thoughts and comments? What do you do if you run Hotmail or Gmail?
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