Open Hack Day: Yahoo’s New Open Source Strategy
Photo of David Filo courtesy of Randy Stewart via Flickr
According to Yahoo co-founder David Filo, hack day represents Yahoo’s new open source strategy.
“The company has embraced open pretty much throughout the entire thing,” said Filo at a press conference. “It is very important to us, this open hack day is an important part of that.”
The setting was Open Hack Day at the company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale. Filo said over the past couple years, Yahoo has realized that in order to keep pace with innovation, they had to embrace the fact that not all the best innovation can become within Yahoo’s walls.
“We’ve done a lot in the last two years and in the last six months the company has really gotten behind this idea of open,” Filo admitted. “In order to bring the company forward this next couple of years, we have to tap into the qualities of other companies, students. Not just for consumers but also for marketplaces.”
Yahoo offers over 30 APIs and web services and over 250,000 API keys have been issued. Most of them are for YUI’s web platform, used to power AJAX user interface improvements in thousands of web sites, and Flickr’s API, for sharing and storing of photos online.
