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I found out about the release of y! mail api from jeremy’s blog. This is really great news. Pipes came out, it is an innovative product and all, but y! mail is one of the top 5 properties for y!. I would say the top 4 properties for y! are Home Page, Search, Mail, Messenger. The 5th spot is open and there are several contenders (finance, maps/local, international etc). Which ever property/asset takes the 5th spot, it is safe to say that the top 4 are the above mentioned.

Right now, 3 of the top 4 properties have an api. This is awesome! Om Malik leads off with ‘what took them so long?’. I couldn’t agree more. But one should recognize that this is a big step for y! and folks like jeremy, caterina had to ‘evangelize’ for a long time for these changes to occur. My experience was that everyone would agree that it is a neat idea and then it would prioritized so low that there are hardly any resources provided for projects like these. Having visible champions who repeatedly assert the message in a positive inclusive way is the only way to go. It takes a while, but that’s the best way to bring about change in large organizations.

APIs are good for the company from a strategic pov because they give an opportunity to become the defacto platform. Becoming the defacto platform ensures that their products and services are indispensable (or atleast have a longer life) to the community. Company sells its products even when outsiders innovate. To be a successful commercial platform, you need several thriving for-profit 3rd parties leveraging your platform. Otherwise, these are resources spent down the drain.

From the community point of view, APIs from big company like yahoo! means that they can innovate on top of the hardwork done by yahoo/google. This often allows smaller players to spend their effort where it is needed most and play to their strengths -innovation.

So if this is the strategic basis of why Yahoo is investing in APIs, they have to be good enough to innovate on top of. are they?

Also, since Yahoo! is both a platform provider and an application provider, there is a small problem with conflict of interest. Microsoft, had no qualms about muscling its platform advantage to win the application world. The microsoft platform strategy is to create 2 apis. One for outside world and one for microsoft. The microsoft api is inherently better than the outsiders api thus ensuring that microsoft applications are better than those of competition.

Does yahoo!’s APIs follow the microsoft path? or are they truly “open” allowing other folks to create competing applications to the one that y! has?

I took a closer look at the y! mail api. It seems pretty neat overall, but i was surprised to note couple of issues. Y! mail designates two types of mail accounts - premium & non-premium. The api developers have an incentive to promote the premium mail product. This is all good. Now here is the kicker. The API has restrictions for non-premium users. The following are the calls allowed for a non-premium user per this page

ListFolders,
ListMessages,
DeleteMessages,
GetUserData,
BatchExecute,,
CreateFolder,
FetchExternalMail,
RemoveFolder,
RenameFolder,
MoveMessages,
EmptyFolder,

Note that one can list messages but one cannot read a message. Consquently, one cannot read attachments. Noticably absent is the “SendMessage” call for non-premium users. I can see some justification in doing this. Y! mail makes money from ads and effectively, these apis are going to remove ads. So, 3rd parties can only provide full email clients to people who paid for not having ads. It seems reasonable, but not good enough.

If I am an api developer, I can build a really crippled mail front end that cannot send or read messages (just list them) and hope to make some money by forcing people to upgrade to premium users. Alternately, I can build a good, fully functional mail client for premium users from who i don’t make any money. Overall, the innovation potential is moderate.

More over, Yahoo! mail client (the one in beta for 2 years) does not have these restrictions, making this api feel very much like a microsoft api strategy rather than a truly fair platform api strategy.

These problems are going to prevent meaningful 3rd party innovation driven by for-profit parties. What is the solution?
My recommendations are:

  • Open up a full api for 3rd party developers irrespective of premium or non-premium clients
  • Figure out a better draw for upgrading to premium other than lack of ads
  • Open the apis for domain registration, management tied into mail
  • Open up the enterprise version of email via apis
  • Commercial Use of APIs must be allowed with some revenue share

Some or all of these are quite hard problems. But becoming a defacto platform is hard. The good news is yahoo! is more than halfway there. They help users manage a lot of user data on y! services. They just need to figure out how to create the right structure for others leverage their platform. Getting users is lot harder than the technical/business model problems they face.

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