Finally, The Internet As Intended.

Yahoo will open source mail. I’m not sure how I missed this announcement - now a few weeks old, but I really like this move. Here’s why:

• Yahoo is a media company. Letting enthusiastic programmers riff on your codebase has *zero* financial downside if your software is free anyway.
• Enthusiastic programmers = enthusiastic users. Enthusiastic users = higher viral adoption. Higher viral adoption = high page view driven advertising. 

In the press release Yahoo! sites tapping into the innovation of programmers as a primary driver for the decision:

"Yahoo is a very large company but we can’t build every applications that a user might want," Dickerson said in an interview at Yahoo headquarters. "You can imagine tens of thousands of niche applications (springing) from Yahoo Mail."

That’s clearly true - but the real value isn’t in "making yahoo mail better" - its in building a way to distribute adviews beyond the borders of Yahoo Mail itself. For any company whose business model is ad supported software-as-a-service, open sourcing is will be strategic long term benefit. Here’s my soundbite - Open is the new lock in. Catchy eh?

Henry Abbott, the sportswriter behind TrueHoop.com (worth the daily read for any hoops fan), wanted information, and now he’s got the world working to get it - with a wiki. On September 7th, 2006, Abbot posted a TrueHoop blog entry titlled "Things that Should be Online, But Aren’t". Number 1 on the list: A complete list of NBA agents and their clients. One month later, TrueHoopWiki.com is making that a reality.

In four short weeks Abbott went from wishlist to growing online resource - a great testimony to the power of the network and simple online collaboration tools.

Here’s how it unfolded:

September 7th:

Abbott Laments the Lack of an Agent-Player List with a Blog Post

September 8th, 11:03 AM:

Doug, a TrueHoop blog reader comments:

Someone should start a collaborative site where fans can postagent-player links. Whenever a player’s agent gets mentioned in a localpaper story it could be posted on the site. Just from reading Pistonsarticles from the last few years I’ve compiled a list of the agents ofall their current players. Though it’s tough to know when a playerswitches agents.

September 8th: Later that day:

Abbot Reiterates the Need

let’s just set up a wiki and collaborate on making that list. Everytime any one of you sees in an article somewhere that it says somethinglike "Al Harrington’s new agent, Arn Tellem…" then you could updatethe wiki.

…and sounds the Wiki call:

I’m not exactly Mr. Technology, so I have been poking around: is there an easy way to put a wiki like that on TrueHoop?… Anyone out there feel like spearheading the technology of such an effort?

3 Weeks in September :

Abbott hooks up with TrueHoop readers Rolando de Aguiar, J.P. Given, Engineer Scotty, and Matt Bailey - the build TrueHoopWiki in 3 short weeks.

October 3:

TrueHoopWiki.com is released into the Wild

Here’s how we hope it will work. If you see an online article about a certain NBA player that mentions their agent, please update TrueHoopWiki (which already has "stub" entries for every current NBA player, or darned close) with the name of the agent and a link to the source article. With lots of people contributing, it shouldn’t take long to have a fairly complete and up-to-date agent resource.

technorati tags:wiki, collaboration

Blogged with Flock