The Real McCrea

Congratulations to the team at Yahoo! Today, they rolled out the first phase of Y!OS, the bold strategy to transform the Internet’s top destination into a social hub that richly interacts with the web at large. Great coverage at TechCrunch and CNET. I won’t wade in with a product review just yet, as I haven’t had a chance to deeply interact with all the new features or trick out my profile. I will try to give a little bit of context to this historic moment, one that Yahoo marked with a gigantic banner decked out with logos of the most important open building blocks, including OpenSocial, OpenID, and OAuth. Alas, we haven’t yet picked a logo for Portable Contacts. ;^(

What we’re seeing here is a major proof point that we are, as I have predicted, about to ride one of Silicon Valley’s “big waves” — those major disruptive changes that open not just new markets, but whole new business ecosystems. Those wave come once every 15 years or so (PCs in the late ’70’s and the Web in ’93, exactly 15 years ago). This big wave is the “Social Web,” and it will change the Internet as we know it, bringing the missing “people layer” to everything. And we’re all building it on a common “open stack”:

The Open Stack was a major topic of discussion at FOWA in London last week, with sessions and talks on it by David Recordon and Chris Messina, and a pointed question about why Facebook has not embraced it directed to Mark Zuckerberg in the “fireside chat.’

For a good overview of Y!OS, check out Cody Simms of Yahoo as a special guest recently on The Social Web TV:

And don’t miss Dare Obasanjo’s “The New Yahoo! Profile and Doing Data Portability the Right Way.”

Oh, yeah, and one last pic. Joseph Smarr and I were so proud and excited to see this day, that we had to dash over and take our picture with the gigantic “open” banner!