September 30, 2008 – Yahoo! Philippines organized a little introduction for Yahoo!’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) at the National Sports Grill in Greenbelt --- with Jojo Anonuevo (General Manager of Yahoo! Philippines), Sau Sheong Chang (Head of Engineering for Yahoo! Southeast Asia) and Andrei Navarro (Yahoo! Open Hack Day 2008 Philippine Representative) heading the discussion.

What is Yahoo! Open Strategy? In a nutshell, Yahoo! Is letting developers see the wires behind some of their services, making APIs/SDKs available directly from them while following OpenSocial standards.

This is in keeping with their “new direction” plan from last year. (From this blog entry: “Deliver open, industry-leading platforms that attract the most publishers and developers.”)

Which is exactly the way to go --- we’re now in an age where we don’t refer to sites as ‘websites’ anymore, we’re on a closer first-name basis. (I’ll Digg your YouTubes.) Now that the web is having a more direct impact on user’s lives, it has to be more personal, customizable and social than ever. (Listen to Tom Serling winging it in “August.”)

Plus, since I’ve made the reference: my cousin isn’t merely a developer --- much like Josh Sterling from Landshark (search it) --- he makes something where yesterday there was nothing. (Like SOME of the fictional parts in my thesis, back in college.)

So why isn’t there a LARGE developer network here yet? (A la-Silicon Valley?) Maybe I should’ve asked that question. (The answer that excludes money and passion issues.)

As a bonus, I DID get to discuss bits of social media --- well, not in front of everyone, but still, that was nice.

ABS-CBN News version