The press wants to focus on what many will percieve is the biggest selling point of the new Yahoo! Music Engine: the price. It’s true, the price is remarkable when stood up alongside the competing services. There is a more sinister force at work, however, under the surface. I touched on it briefly in my last post. It’s what differentiates YME from the other players in terms of openness. Brad Hill at the digital music weblog gets it, though. The guys working on YME want it to be an open platform where the willing can extend it in ways the product team never imagined, never had time for or were never allowed to by the company.
This seems to be a recurring theme at Yahoo! lately. An overall acknowledgement that making the content and the interfaces available is a good thing. The Yahoo! search developer site bears this out. In addition to XML service APIs to run search queries they’ve compiled a list of the RSS feeds Yahoo! makes available.
These are exciting times at Yahoo! It seems every week we’re releasing some cool, new product or service. Now I’ve just got to get my stuff out the door.
General: So can someone concievably build their own business around the open APIs?
Specific: Can you make the fantasy sports team open their APIs so I can build my own view of the stupid game?
General: I’m not sure about building your business around the open APIs. I believe the Web Search services are not available for commercial use in that you can’t charge money for anything that uses the web search API. Reading the RSS page, it looks like the policy for using the RSS feeds is the same (not for commercial use).
Specific: I’m not involved with the fantasy sports team so I can’t make them do anything. And as far as I can tell their APIs are open, they’re just not documented.