Yahoo chose the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco today to announce its was rewiring its whole network.
Who knows what Microsoft will make of this, given its plans to acquire the company. Microsoft itself has launched its Mesh hybrid computing platform at the conference.
Yahoo’s new chief technology officer, Ari Balogh, told attendees its moves were not to build a new social network, but to “build social into everything we do.”
He showed off some smart retooling ideas such as a Yahoo Mail application that allows you to sort through your Inbox more efficiently - highlighting emails from people that are part of your closest social network. From today, the company is opening up its environment for developers to build applications that users can add to any Yahoo page.
Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, used her keynote to talk about the Firefox browser being worked on for mobile phones. Fennec, named after the small version of a fox found in the Sahara Desert, is much faster than existing cell phone browsers, according to early reports.
Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, spoke by video from London and answered questions in an online chatroom set up by the conference organisers. His argument seems to be that new smaller devices for accessing the internet, such as the iPhone, are more proprietary and closed than the internet accessed through a PC. Increasing use of them will stifle innovation, he says.
I’m not sure I agree, given how open the iPhone is becoming and the forthcoming virtualisation on mobile phones, which would allow them to run any kind of operating system or browsers like Fennec, which is open source and open to every kind of additional features.
You can read Richard Waters’ review of Jonathan’s book here.
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