Internet giant Yahoo is working ways to beef up its revenue following a festering takeover attempt from Microsoft—and a near shareholder rebellion when that deal didn’t go through. One of the ways the company is looking to expand its reach is through a new “openness” designed to integrate content and offerings from third parties alongside Yahoo’s own. The first Yahoo business to get the make-over will be its long-struggling music offering, which will receive a revamp in the next few weeks to feature content and services from partners like Amazon, iTunes, and Pandora…along with in-house Yahoo services like Flickr. Yahoo will also focus on streamlining the user experience on Yahoo services, including providing customized pages based on users’ interests and activities.
Yahoo’s “open” model is designed both to integrate Yahoo with the larger Internet ecosystem, so that it no longer functions like a large private garden of Yahoo-only services. However, Yahoo also hopes to insert itself into the center of that ecosystem, making itself Internet users’ preferred way to tap into preferred content and services, regardless of whether they’re from Yahoo.
Yahoo anticipates making its pages more interactive, addressing Web users’ short attention spans by enabling them to expand (or collapse) offerings on pages without having to navigate to a new page or refresh. Similarly, Yahoo plans to integrate services into single Web applications so that users can, say, take advantage of Flickr features directly within Yahoo Mail.
Yahoo also announced an expansion of its mobile development platform BluePrint to build standalone applications for Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Java, as well as stand-alone mobile Web sites. The company also announced preview of oneConnect for the iPhone, enabling users to update their status and keep track of their friends via SMS and social networking services.
