IDGNS: Could you explain the social-profile concept in the Y OS context?

Sample: In terms of the mechanism underneath, that's fundamental to Y OS: The unification of the profile. It's taking the user data and making it centrally available and therefore available to the user all across the network.

Yahoo has quite a few different [user] profiles in services like Kickstart, Yahoo 360, Mash, and the like. [Network Division Executive Vice President] Jeff Weiner was quoted recently saying that Yahoo has 25 different profiles that he's trying to work through. If he's the EVP of products and sees that as a challenge, imagine what's it like for an end-user.

Part of our strategy is to normalize those profiles and collapse them into a single place and reduce user confusion. We'll make a single dashboard for them to update their information, and we'll go from looking like 25 different Yahoos with 25 different profiles to one Yahoo and one profile.

IDGNS: This dashboard "social profile" will be rolled out later as a Y OS component?

Sample: Yes. It'll be one of the larger user-facing components.

IDGNS: How will the APIs and development tools be made uniform?

Sample: We took the first steps in a relaunch of our YDN developer network site a few weeks ago. Beyond that, there's an initiative around Y OS to normalize Web services and give developers a single access point. You'll use your developer ID or credential and use Yahoo APIs in a uniform way.

Again, Yahoo growing up quickly over 14 years means that some of our APIs we developed in-house and others we acquired, and in that growth we've seen a lot of variability in how the APIs look like. Much like with the profiles, there were lots of different views of what Yahoo was if you were a developer. Y OS is putting out a Web service standard for our APIs so that developers can learn Yahoo in one place, one time, and leverage that with any API, instead of having to learn each one separately.

IDGNS: It sounds like there is a big data portability component to Y OS.

Sample: Yes, that's our third phase, which is opening up Yahoo everywhere. It involves letting users, with full transparency and control, take their data with them. The data is essentially theirs and they can use it wherever they want to.