ReadWriteWeb recently posted an article talking about Yahoo’s Y!OS initiative. Here’s a quote:
Dubbed the ‘rewiring of Yahoo,’ Y!OS 1.0 launched this week with the introduction of the social suite. Its strategy focuses on opening up almost everything to developers, including content, traffic, and Yahoo’s user base.
I’ve been thinking the walled garden approach to social media is not very good in the long-term. It comes with the risk that if a compelling enough substitute were to come along, you lose members.
Alternatively, if a service were to use an open way of managing user profiles, it could possibly avoid the risk of be usurped. Giving up user profiles might seem risky in itself, but the service could adapt more quickly to the changing capability of a user’s profile “agents”. Today my profile might be the aggregation of my activity on Twitter+Facebook+Blog+Flickr+Google+LinkedIn+… but tomorrow it will be different, with different kinds of data. Today I manage most of all that activity manually. But just as notification of this new blog post will auto-post to Twitter and Facebook, I see a time coming soon where all of this can be done through a “dashboard” of sorts.
This dashboard would have to be stored online somewhere, in a safe place. But this profile dashboard is not like Gmail ot WordPress. It should be a kind of API instead, where a whole slew of software products can be developed to interact with your profile and in turn your profile with all the services synced to it. I could then use an iPhone client, or a web application, or a robot; I could have a robot ‘tweeting’ photos and info about my vegetable garden, and over time I could play, mashup, and mix the dataset in all kinds of ways to learn how to get more veggies.
I don’t know if Y!OS is the answer, but it seems there are a growing number of solutions that are getting us closer to when you let your profile do most of the information filtering of the blinding information that will be the web in 10 or 15 years, maybe sooner.
