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Social networking is about to take a new turn in the coming months. Yahoo! is in the process of releasing its Open Strategy with the goal of connecting more people in more ways than ever before.

There are more social networking sites on the web than any one person could use or keep up with. There’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, not to mention Netflix, eBay, or other sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, or Reddit, and that doesn’t even cover the various mail and address book services like Gmail, MSN, and Yahoo.

On the surface, Facebook and eBay do not appear to have anything in common, but they do: they both involve social activity on the web. But there’s nothing linking them together. If you want to tell your wife you outbid the competition for a brand new football-shaped lamp for the bedroom, you can’t tell her through eBay, you have to switch to your email and copy and paste links. Or let’s say you read about a movie you think your mom might enjoy. You can’t contact her directly through Netflix to make your recommendation. Once again, you have to open your email account.

Yahoo wants to change all that through a revolutionary transformation by breaking down barriers and unifying the web. Speaking of unification, did you realize that Yahoo sits on Google’s OpenSocial board, and they meet once a week?

Yahoo! is rolling out a platform approach for the web that combines online activities through a unified identity, connects users, and provides activity updates—all through an access layer—regardless of whether you and your friends are on Yahoo or not.

For this to work, the following must happen:

1. Developers like you need to create the applications.
2. Yahoo and the third-party sites need to approve the applications.
3. Users need to find and use the applications.
4. Most importantly, the users' friends must reciprocate.

To help developers meet the first requirement, Yahoo released YQL (Yahoo Query Language), which is basically the same as SQL except that it is extended to model and fit web services. This week, Yahoo is revealing more about the developer side of this social transformation.

Users already meet the third and fourth requirements all the time. For example, would you be on Facebook if your friends weren’t there? Would you have an e-mail program if you had no one to send e-mail to? So why wouldn't Yahoo's platform work?

For a glimpse of what is to come, download and install Instant Messenger Beta 9. This latest version has a bunch of new options. For example, if you use Blogger or Facebook, you can add a PingBox, which allows you to support an IM application. The thing works great. I installed it on a personal blog of mine this morning, asked a friend to test it, and the next thing I knew, he added it to his blog.

I could go on and on about this, but I’ll let Cody Simms’, Senior Director, Product Management for the Yahoo Open Strategy, blog do all the talking. There’s a presentation there to help developers get to work.

I had the opportunity to attend Yahoo’s second Open Hack Day at the Sunnyvale, CA campus. This was my first time visiting and I was impressed. It’s a big campus, with several buildings, a cafeteria with better food than some restaurants, free sodas, a fitness center that could rival certain fitness chains, and of course, purple chairs with yellow trim. How could you ask for anything more?

How about a 24-hour hack fest complete with kegs, old-school video games, an outdoor concert, and an open, collaborative, community atmosphere for developing the next great application? That’s what Open Hack Day is all about. Over 400 attendees registered for the event and 40 of them signed up for a camping spot on the Yahoo lawn. Walking around on Friday afternoon, I spotted giant bins filled with purple Frisbees, basketballs, and racks of T-shirts and pullovers. Yahoo really pulled out all the stops to keep the developers entertained while they worked (they call this work?) on their hacks.

During the press conference, Yahoo executives updated the media on the Yahoo Developer Network. The short of it is: Yahoo is alive and kicking. The executives presented us with a laundry list of API’s and applications that developers can use in their every day work—some of which I had no idea Yahoo even owned.

Let me list just a few: MyBlogLog, Delicious, FireEagle, SearchMonkey, BOSS, Flickr, and YUI. A developer can build a fairly sophisticated web site using the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library, which is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. An extremely brief demonstration left me impressed.

During my visit, I was handed a map of the Yahoo Developer Network. I found it interesting that Yahoo lists Open Social, My Space, and Google on their map. Yahoo connects to Google through Yahoo’s address book APIs, MyBlogLog, and Yap. Why would Yahoo advertise Google on a list of their web services? Perhaps Yahoo truly does want to foster open, collaborative, community-oriented development for the web.

Check out Yodel Anecdotal for more information on Open Hack Day, including a link to the list of winners.

At a lunch conference yesterday, Yahoo! released Fire Eagle out of beta. This API allows you to broadcast your location to whomever you want, automatically or manually via your phone. You can post your location on your blog or other various sites. To me, and certain segments of the population, this sounds like a nightmare. To other segments of the population, this sounds way-cool. The latter segment is the same population that thinks email is ancient technology. How secure does today’s youth feel that they want people to know exactly—to the address—of their current location?

At yesterday’s press conference, I saw three different demos of this type of application. The first was from Pownce. The 25-year old co-founder presented Pownce as a means to “send stuff to your friends” because who has time for email and all that spam? Pownce uses Fire Eagle and tells all your friends where you are, in case you want them to join you, without courtesy of an invite or a phone call. Because, you know, phone calls and invitations take so much time what with all the dialing, ringing, and having to leave a voice mail… and then you have to wait for someone to call you back. Who has time for that?

Moveable Type, Six Apart’s flagship product, was the second demo and also featured Fire Eagle. You guessed it, this application allows you to post your current location on your blog. Just in case you want anyone who happens to read your blog to stop by and say hello, or mug you, or something…

The last demo was the most useful looking, to me. Outside.in Radar brings you local blogging news. Based on the concept that you are concerned about the pot hole on your street and not concerned about the pot hole in the next city, Outside.in Radar tells you who is blogging what within 1000 feet of your zip code (you manually provide your zip code). I gave it a test drive and I learned that someone wrote a review of a restaurant that is within walking distance of my home. The site provided more links to more information about this restaurant—and several others in the area—that I don’t think I’ll ever have time to click on them all. It also allows you to track all future news items about this restaurant. It is information overload at it’s finest. Talk about a time suck. I could seriously get lost on this site.

As for me using Fire Eagle, I think I’ll put it on hold. I’m very comfortable without people knowing exactly where I am at all times. Unexpected visits do not sound all that appealing to me. But then again, I think email is still useful, so I am probably not the targeted audience for this API.

When I started with DevX, I knew nothing of the Semantic Web and the technologies that surround it. As I researched the subject, I realized that while a segment of the developer community was heavily touting semantic technologies (ST), that everyday use was still three-quarters of a mile out of reach. One of the main issues surrounding ST is a lack of available functionality for the user. Sure, I’ve seen lots of examples, and lots of demos, but nothing grabbed me that made me say, this is way cool, this is something I could use. That is, until now.

Today, DevX posted an article by James Leigh that describes how to get started with OpenCalais and SearchMonkey. These tools offer functionality that could be used by developers and the public. The OpenCalais tool (OpenCalais 2.1 just went live), offers a means to create metadata that describes a document’s content. And who of us in this blogging world, who realizes that content is king, would not find something like that useful? Especially if it means that authors and editors no longer have to manually create metadata, and instead, a tool can extract it for us. To me, that’s awesome.

SearchMonkey, as we all know by now, can enhance how your site appears in search results. And who in this business-minded world does not want control of their marketing and branding; especially in a front-line environment like search engines? Stay tuned to DevX for an upcoming article from Peter Mika entitled, Semantic Search Arrives to the Web.

With the advent of Calais 2.1 and SearchMonkey, it appears that ST can become a must-have tool in a developer’s war chest. I encourage you to read James’ article and to research these tools more.

Google launched its largest and first paid-admission developer conference, Google I/O, yesterday in San Francisco with a 90-minute keynote session to show off a number of its web development products and initiatives. The message of the presentation, titled "Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud" and led by Google Engineering Vice President Vic Gundotra, was nothing new; much of it echoed O'Reilly's "Web 2.0" conception, Salesforce.com's and BungeeLabs' platform as a service (PaaS), and the Sun Microsystems corporate motto, "The Network Is the Computer."

Gundotra explained Google's high-level goal as moving the web forward by enabling web developers to:

1. Access the cloud more easily (with Google App Engine);
2. Leverage more power from the browser (with Google Web Toolkit); and
3. Maintain pervasive connectivity in their applications (with Android and Gears).

Google App Engine
The PaaS pitch for developers was Google App Engine: Google will host their applications on its servers for free and charge only when the applications exceed either 500MB of persistent storage or the bandwidth and CPU necessary for 5 million monthly page views. Although the pricing model won't be finalized until the end of the year and App Engine is still in preview, Google announced open signup for all interested developers. Developers need only sign up, develop the web applications on their local machines, and deploy them to Google. Launching the application then is just a matter of serving the application's URL to your end users. However, the App Engine runtime environment currently uses only Python. Google is considering other languages and runtime configurations for future releases. So if you're not a Python developer, you'll have to learn the language or wait.

Google Web Toolkit
The announcement of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5 Release Candidate (GWT 1.5 RC) was Google's effort to make the browser more powerful. GWT uses an optimizing cross-compiler to convert Java code input, written in the IDE of your choice, into compiled JavaScript output for target browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari). GWT 1.5 RC adds full Java 5 language support—the most requested feature from GWT users, according to Bruce Johnson, Google's GWT engineering manager.

During his demo, Johnson explained that when developers write an application directly in pure JavaScript, they're responsible for optimizing and maintaining that code themselves.  But with GWT, developers write applications in maintainable Java code, and the cross-compiler produces the fastest JavaScript possible for that application—with no concessions to maintainability.

If you like the GWT functionality but code in C#, check out Script# as an alternative. 

Android and Gears
The Android and Gears demos filled the pervasive connectivity role. Android Engineering Director Steve Horowitz demonstrated the much-talked-about mobile development stack on a mobile device. The home screen featured the typical items you'd expect (e-mail, Internet, contacts, etc.), and Horowitz's touch-screen navigation would've had more appeal if the iPhone hadn't already been on the scene. But things got interesting when he pointed the WebKit browser to Google Maps. Horowitz set the device to Compass mode while viewing a Google Maps Street View of the San Francisco waterfront. Holding the device at arms length, he turned around 180 degrees in either direction and the Street View moved in relation to him, providing a sweep of the waterfront image. That trick drew applause.

MySpace's Senior VP of Engineering, Allen Hurff, conducted the Gears demo. A browser plug-in, Gears (formerly Google Gears) uses a local server, database, and worker pool to enable users to interact with web applications while they're offline. Hurff showed this capability by doing a full text search of his 300-plus MySpace Mail messages without calling back to the MySpace servers. Each search term he entered dynamically narrowed his messages to only the matching results, and the search was powered completely by his local machine.

The keynote's message of "Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud" was nothing I hadn't heard before. But what made it compelling was that it came from a child of the Web era (you could say the poster child—in the canon of web-based services alongside Amazon, eBay, and now MySpace). Google itself was born of open standards/open source software, the Internet as the platform, and the proverbial web company founder story: two computer whiz kids in their college dorm room with a brilliant idea and no money. What's possible for those kids—and whiz grownups—today? Google believes it has the tools to help them find out.