For the last six months, struggling Web portal Yahoo has been promoting a more social approach to its various properties, an initiative dubbed Open Strategy by CEO Carol Bartz.
Last December, Yahoo launched the initiative by opening Yahoo Mail to a variety of third-party applications, including Yahoo Greetings, Flixster Movies, Flickr, Photos by Spit, Family Journal, and WordPress. Now the company is allowing third-party applications on its personalized home pages.
“This week,” said Tapan Bhat, senior vice president of Yahoo’s Integrated Consumer Experiences, “you’ll find a number of new third-party ‘apps’ and ‘widgets’ on Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Connected TV, and Zimbra e-mail to give you quicker access to the things you do online every day — whether planning your dinner menu, sharing photos with friends, or looking for YouTube videos.”
Is Open Strategy Enough?
According to Bhat, the average consumer visits 85 different Web sites per month (which actually sounds low). The goal of Open Strategy, he said, is to figure out how to help consumers do more things at once.
The real purpose, of course, is to make the Yahoo home pages “stickier” and, well, “Googlier.” Yahoo was long ago overtaken as the dominant online search engine by Google, and is now chasing to catch up with iGoogle, the widget-enabled home pages that Google offers its users.
This is the second significant home-page announcement from Yahoo recently. On May 26, Bhat outlined the company’s efforts to improve the overall personalization of Yahoo home pages.
“We recently started testing some new designs based on your feedback,” Bhat said. “We recognize that many of you like your home page just the way it is, thank you very much, so the overall look and feel of the page will be familiar. But take a closer look, and you’ll see that we’ve made some fundamental improvements and packed…