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Process Under Way

The process is already ongoing, as Yahoo on Thursday announced the opening up in beta of its Search Monkey development environment, which lets external developers customize Yahoo search results to make them, in theory, more relevant and richer with information. Yahoo had announced its intention to do this in February.

Yahoo expects to hit more significant milestones in its opening-up process throughout the year, he said.

With this vision, Yahoo seems to be finally tossing out the window its failed and misguided attempts to compete against MySpace and Facebook by creating a straight-ahead social networking site, like its disappointing Yahoo 360.

Instead, Yahoo is going to attempt to harness its users worldwide, which have some 10 billion latent social relationships already established amongst themselves via their Yahoo Messenger contact lists, Yahoo Mail address books and the like.

By unifying all Yahoo user profiles, Yahoo will create its own consistent social graph for the benefit of both consumers and developers, he said. From the social graph, Yahoo will be able to establish relevant connections among users, as well as event streams of what people are doing online, which are popular on Facebook and via FriendFeed.

"We don't think of social as a destination. We think of social as a dimension. It infuses every element of the consumer's experience on the Web," Balogh said.

Yahoo will also take care of making sure that people are in control of the applications they opt to add and thus share data with, as well as making sure that data is kept safe.