14 DAY TRIAL // The fellows at Yahoo! are planning something really big, a change that, they say, will change Yahoo! users web experience. And they, the users, only have to wait until the second half of 2008 to see it, which is pretty close. At Web 2.0 Expo, Ari Balogh, Yahoo's new Chief Technology Officer, has presented Yahoo's strategy for a new open Yahoo. The new strategy aims at improving the quality of Yahoo products and the general experience of its users.
The first stage of this new Yahoo is also known as StageMonkey, a platform that has been talked about ever since February 2008. StageMonkey is a developers' platform that is said to use web standards and structured data in order to enhance the search results, while also taking into consideration fields like functionality, appearance and usefulness. SearchMonkey can improve a website search experience, through user-generated applications. Yahoo rolled out a limited preview of the SearchMonkey Developer Tool at the Web 2.0 Expo, which took place in San Francisco between 22 and 25 of April.
As part of the big makeover, all of Yahoo! pages are expected to change, especially those that are meant for social networking, like the Yahoo! 360. It appears that Yahoo! 360 users will have their profile pages changed and exported to a place where all of the Yahoo profiles will be connected. This is just a part of Yahoo's strategy for changing the social experience of users. The company, as stated by Ari Balogh, is going to rewire Yahoo from inside out.
Yahoo's new strategy is most certainly going to change a lot in the way users will perceive Yahoo. That is, if the change is not going to come back at them if users are not going to accommodate to it. Still, we are already seeing a part of Yahoo's new strategy, as they have launched the new Beta Glue Page, for Yahoo India. The Glue Page offers a new experience to the way users receive their search results.