Many people are waiting for the death of Yahoo. Regardless of the impending layoffs and restructuring, Yahoo is still fighting for the future.

The big question for Yahoo is what future does it have? Should they try to get into the social network scene? Well, they already failed once with Mash and have had lackluster results with their other social effort Yahoo 360. Or should they try to go bleeding edge, and instead of just integrating some semantic technologies, go “whole hog” and develop a semantic search engine?

Well, Yahoo has been developing its version of the future for several months. This week we received notice that the future according to Yahoo 1.0 is ready. Yahoo announced the universal profile and version 1.0 of Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS). The components of the “social suite” are:

Social Directory - the new user profile data and user connections.

Contacts/Address Book - the mapping of the user contacts and the inevitable hooks of the social strategy with email.

Updates - the implicit sharing of actions, which sounds more like the aggregation of FriendFeed and Facebook Live Feeds.

Presence - the sharing of simple status text, because no social platform seems to be complete without status text.

More importantly, you will notice that search is not explicitly included. This is because search is now just another part of their platform. BOSS and SearchMonkey are putting search into third party developers’ hands. Based on this, we can assume that Yahoo has admitted it has lost search unless people create tools on top of their search, or they start integrating more social and semantic services into their search.

So, why is all of this important? Yahoo is still one of the most highly visited websites. My Yahoo is still considered to have the largest user base for a personalized homepage. Yahoo Mail is still one of the largest Web mail installations. Yahoo Buzz has been known to drive a million visitors to a highlighted page. Now Yahoo is planning to hook all of this together.

CNET’s Dan Farber has a great nugget from the Yahoo plan:

Over time, properties such as Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Flickr and Yahoo Buzz, will be socially enabled beyond activity feeds, Stoneham said. He gave an example of requesting a review from a user’s connections while perusing a product page in Yahoo Shopping. When a review is posted it shows up in the user’s activity feed. In addition, miniprofiles are available to get information quickly about the reviewer.

If Yahoo can integrate all of their services together with their new profiles, they will instantly become one of the largest social networks, if not the largest social network. Obviously, Yahoo’s target is no longer search. Yahoo is going after Facebook and MySpace. The important thing to note is that the entire Y!OS is API ready. That means that developers will have access to a massive user base and the potential of having their widget in front of more people than a Facebook application can provide. To see how all of this is supposed to work, look at the image below:

As you can see, they are planning on having Mail, the Front Page, Search, Media and other partner sites integrated with the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP). By having a widget or application that can also use the Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP), a developer has a huge number of possibilities. The additional benefit of using these APIs is that you can have a social widget on your own site much like the initial plans for Google’s Friend Connect and Facebook Connect.

Yahoo may be having problems right now with their leadership, but the developers within Yahoo are still working. Yahoo is now going after third party developers in order to have them create applications on their platform in the easiest way possibly. It may seem like a desperate attempt at retaining relevance, but many businesses have been built this way. One other company built a business based on a platform by making it easy for developers to create applications, Microsoft. We all know how that story turned out. The future of Yahoo is as a platform. The future of Yahoo is social. The future of Yahoo is now in developers’ hands.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Yahoo Opening Up (Kind Of)Yahoo Search Monkey Reveals More Details on Developer PlatformCodase: The Source Code Search EngineBreaking: Yahoo Announces Earnings, Updates on ProgressYahoo-Google Deal Looking Good; Common Sense Packs Up And LeavesIMified Announces Developer Platform. Make Your Own IM Bots.Facebook Offering Data Storage to Developers?

Source:Mashable!

“The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book, you either do it right or you get eliminated.”

- Gordon Gecko, Wall Street

Corporations exist in a continuously changing ecosystem, with behavior strategies, evolution, cooperation, competition, camouflage, mimicry, and yes, extinction. The environment is constantly changing; disequilibrium is the norm.

Similarly, the governments of countries exist in a complex global ecosystem of competition, trade, and war. Some countries are up, some are down, and many are in the middle – and these ranks evolve due to many factors. Even Gecko himself compares the fictional Teldar Paper to “that other malfunctioning corporation, the U.S. of A.”

If the federal government doesn’t want our country to go the way of the dodo, it needs to adapt to changing times – and changing technology, including the many emerging Web 2.0 tools. One Gecko-ish malfunction of government is that it collects a huge amount of data with which it does hardly anything truly useful. Crime statistics, labor trends, pothole locations and many other interesting bits haven’t often been easily accessible, and that strategy doesn’t serve the public well.

Information Innovation

No longer. Innovative people are finding interesting uses for government data. Witness just one example, SpotCrime, a comprehensive private sector mashup of crime reports and real-time interactive maps for not just every state in the U.S., but also many countries around the world.

Using SpotCrime-DC for about 5 minutes, I quickly learned of three recent robberies occurring very close to my home – all between 7:00 and 7:30 am. (Note to self, no morning jogs around the neighborhood.) No one is uninterested in this topic, whether you are protecting your family or just scoping out the competition – but without this simple to use mashup, the information would be overwhelming, confusing, and inaccessible (although technically it is “publicly available.”)

The U.S. government has more than just crime data, though. They have massive storehouses of geographic data, labor statistics, transportation information, census data, genealogies, environmental and ecological trends, economic indicators, and statistics on aging, to name a few. There is literally something for everyone.

Now, a lot of this data is already publicly available; but in what formats? Take this example of the top 100 growing counties in the U.S.. However, you have to download the data in an Excel spreadsheet or as a .CSV file – how many people even know what to do with a .CSV file? And what if you can’t afford Excel, or don’t have it handy when you want to use the public data?

Public Incentives, Private Competition

How can this data best be delivered to people? Here’s

one example. In what can only be described as a very hip initiative, the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer is collaborating with local interactive content agency iStrategyLabs to launch an innovation challenge called Apps for Democracy (disclosure: Mashable is a media sponsor).

This contest, open to absolutely anyone, aims primarily to visualize DC’s open, public data for the greater good of citizens, visitors, and local businesses. These public service developers will compete for both cash prizes and public recognition.

The District of Columbia is thinking very broadly about the products that will result from the innovation challenge – in play are Web applications, widgets, map mashups, iPhone apps, Facebook apps, and more. Unquestionably, this effort can serve as a model for the federal government to enhance its massive data stores by offering incentives for open-source efforts by outside developers.

Organizations like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) already have public, fun competitions like the Urban Challenge, so why not something similar to build widgets, games, and apps?

Finally, a good reason to hack the country.

Dr. Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow studying Social Software for Security (S3) at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:MySpace Hacker Found and Punished, Kinda.Netflix Hack for DRM-Free Movie DownloadsFree MySpace Music Downloads?Who Sucks More - GoDaddy or MySpace?Costly Hack Amounts to $825K. Pirate Bay’s Secret Source?MySpace Hack?MediaDefender-Defender Hacker Ethan Speaks Out

Source:Mashable!

Launching today at CES i-Stage, YouBundle allows you to create collections or “bundles” of multimedia content and websites all related to a central theme or topic that you select.

You could compare YouBundle to sites such as Twine, socialmedian, Squidoo or Flowgram. The focal point being the accumulation, centralization and distribution of related subject matter. These bundles can then be shared through a widget that you can embed on any of your sites, blogs or social networking profiles.

There are two ways to create and update these bundles. You can use the bundle wizard on their site or you can use the bookmarklet that will let you add sites and content to any bundle while you’re surfing the Web. Any time you update a bundle, all of the widgets embedded for that bundle will be updated with the latest information

The other way these bundles can be shared is via RSS feeds, which will soon be available for every bundle that users create. This will allow these streams of data to be used in countless mashups and other ways that developers can create.

Members also get to vote on bundles with a “Bump” (Thumbs up) or “Dump” (Thumbs down) rating, which should give everyone in the community a good idea of which bundles and members provide the most value.

Anyone viewing your bundle can share it with other sites such as Digg, Facebook, Delicious, etc. They can also suggest a link or other content for the bundle, or grab the code for the widget and embed it on any of their sites. At this time, bundles can support YouTube, Vimeo and MetaCafe videos, Flickr, PhotoBucket and SmugMug photos, hyperlinks and documents in PDF format, as well as Microsoft Office Compatible formats (DOC, XLS).

It truly is amazing just how many ways we can slice and dice all of the information that we have at our disposal today online. YouBundle has added yet another method of collecting and sharing this information the way that we want to show it for the subject matters that we find interesting. Is their service offering anything new? I think the answer is yes thanks to the ability to share these bundles or streams through widgets and RSS feeds. It’s always a good move when a service allows its users to take whatever they’ve created on their site and use it elsewhere. Of course, the people will be the final judge on whether or not this is a bundle of joy.

Here’s a video with more information on YouBundle: