Finally, someone that gets it: Yahoo Bigtime Open(ing) + Facebook: read and weep

Yahoo has released Y! OS 1.0 platform! I've tried to play lately with Facebook's API and FQL, for purposes of developing smart applications with non-PII user data, in the spirit of Web 3.0: a big pain in the ass! Facebook's data is not that open at all. It's a silo in disguise. You basically cannot process (therefore store either, because if you are trying to run an algorithmic process on the user data without actually taking the data out, you can't) data in order to, for instance, develop a recommendation system that recommends your friends, or objects of interest between common sets of friends (from school versus work, etc.). This, apparently in the name of user privacy. Truth is that my deep desire as a user is to take my data with me wherever I may be; and mind you, this doesn't mean that I am "stealing" Facebook's traffic, because I can devise my product to send traffic to Facebook. But nooooooo! That just tells you how hypocritical Facebook is: its concept is revolutionary in its understanding of content as object-oriented, but its monetization is soooooo 1.0: pages, pages and more pages (of eyeball traffic). Of course, I believe I have an idea or three about how to monetize Web 3.0 in terms of "monetizing data", not pages, but when I hear of Facebook and others "opening up" their data, I laugh: first off, it's not that open, second of all, so what! They're still monetizing it old school, with R/F eyeballs (with a fairly low CPM if you ask me).

But now, after I heard about it through Y!DN and at the Web 3.0 Conference early this month in Santa Clara, Yahoo seems to have gotten it a lot better, as the TechCrunch article tells you: first off, the application platform allows developers to access your and your friends' activity stream both on Yahoo and elsewhere on the web; then, address book portability. These features soon to me very promising in developing the type of smart applications I am salivating for: automatically sort email based on importance of friends (or perhaps even by work friends versus beer friends, etc.); create "personas" that one can associate with their own activity streams on the web/Yahoo, and associate them (or even perhaps share with) similar friends.

NOW we're talking. I think Yahoo! is particularly motivated to be more aggressive about this and open up into a platform, then others (it's the "we try harder" strategy since Y! hasn't done well lately). For whatever reason, this pushes the boundaries of what's open, and gets closer to my dream (of taking my data, meshing it into others, and develop smart apps that I can carry with me). The only thing that's left is figuring out how to make money on this, in a different way than through the good old eyeball marketing. Truth be told, Yahoo! may also be closer than Facebook at least, particularly given the fact that since Facebook is not that open, the only thing I am left to do with the latter is read/look at pages and pages and pages (read, not read/write).

So Yahoo! this is great, I will start playing with Y!OS (I can hardly wait), but my question is: how are you monetizing this in a way that's more about data and people than pages and eyeballs? Let me know when you figure it out :-)