Desperate for an edge, Yahoo adds a 'Plus' to its 'Open Strategy'

On what could possibly have been the worst possible day for the company to throw a party, yesterday Yahoo lifted the veil on its new suite of open source services designed to work like browser add-ons.

It could actually be a very good idea: Rather than build a competitive suite of Web services that are deployed like pages, or URLs that one "goes to," Yahoo's plan is to develop services that people can figure out how to use more simply and directly, by plugging them into their browsers of choice as though those services were native functionality.

It's the company's BrowserPlus system, first revealed last May as part of Yahoo's heralded new Open Strategy platform. Y!OS not only gives developers a free API to tap into Yahoo's services directly, but encourages them to build components that they can distribute and profit from, and that also could only help build traffic around Yahoo.

And it was unveiled yesterday. The day that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang resigned, leaving a vacuum at the top that will most likely be filled, some analysts speculate, by an interim head who could transition Yahoo into a division of another company -- maybe Microsoft. In which case, not even a plethora of "plusses" may revive the Open Strategy.

Nonetheless, for what it's worth, the BrowserPlus project is going forward. By the middle of next year, its developers promised yesterday, the entire project will be made open source.

In a message to prospective developers on the company's forum late last night, the BrowserPlus team's Lloyd Hilaiel wrote, "Our goal is to empower the community to contribute actual patches and new services -- code to compliment the feedback. As we move forward, we hope that this platform will contribute to the open Web by enabling rapid innovation and giving us all a chance to weigh in on what exactly the web of tomorrow should look like. By committing today to open sourcing of the platform we hope that people realize we're genuinely committed to a better browser."

Call it a "hail-Mary pass," but so far, it appears well-thrown. While Yahoo cannot exactly build a new Web browser the way Google can, its strategy -- according to Hilaiel, in a scripted Q&A on the company's blog -- is to remake the Web browser from the inside out, in effect leveraging the technology that's already there as a platform upon which to extend its own brand.

"For today's release of BrowserPlus, we've announced our intent to open source this original Yahoo technology, enabling open development on a platform for in-browser desktop applications," stated Hilaiel. "This will allow developers to rapidly extend the platform in a distributed fashion. Our hope is that community contributions and review will ensure BrowserPlus stays a secure, robust platform running on all popular operating systems and browsers. I'd like to see BrowserPlus become a valuable piece of Internet infrastructure."

Elsewhere in that Q&A, Hilaiel stated that the BrowserPlus team is already scattered across the US. The first, and perhaps most important, challenge facing that team in just the coming few weeks will be to hang on and tough it out through what will inevitably be Yahoo's most sweeping re-organization to date.