Yahoo! Application Platform

The web is open. And now Yahoo! is open too. Get in front of the largest daily audience on the web. Over 330 million unique visitors worldwide come to Yahoo! each month. Now, developers like you can unleash your applications onto the world's most popular homepage and across the Yahoo! network. Check it out!

The Yahoo! Application Platform allows you to reach our users and improve the Yahoo! user experience by building and deploying new applications directly onto Yahoo! pages, writing code the way you love to write it. We're looking to you to help us build the next big thing on Yahoo!, and in turn we'll shower you with traffic and users. Sounds like a win/win, doesn't it? That's our goal!

How Do I Get Started?

Take a quick look at the building blocks of an application, described in Anatomy of an Open Application.
Step through the Getting Started tutorial.
Build your own application now: Go to My Projects and create a new Open Application.

About the Yahoo! Application Platform

An Open Marketplace for Innovation

You don't have to be a huge software development house to get your applications onto Yahoo!. YAP is a wide open, self service environment that allows you to build an application and submit it to us, with no business development deal needed. Build powerful applications using your software stack, your environment, and your servers. You can write your application in whatever language you want and proxy it back to us. Instant distribution.

Applications on Yahoo! homepage, My Yahoo!, and Yahoo! Toolbar

The applications you build can now be used by millions of users on Yahoo!'s most popular destination websites. Today, your applications can appear on users' Yahoo! homepage, My Yahoo!, and Yahoo! Toolbar. Stay tuned as we continue to open up more and more of our websites in 2010.

Multiple Views

With each app, you can develop and deploy a "Small View" and "Canvas View". The Canvas View is a stand-alone web page that gives you full freedom to flex your technology muscles. The Small View gets added into existing Yahoo! properties and services when they add your application.

Social Context

You can easily make your applications socially relevant to users. You can let a user interact with their connections and connections' content by leveraging the new Yahoo! Social Directory API.

Social Distribution

Your application can give users the option to share their actions and activities within the application with their connections via Updates. Applications can fully leverage the Updates API, and publish Updates wherever users can access them. This includes the Profile and Yahoo! Messenger with more Updates distribution points coming soon!

OpenSocial

OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. Built from standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create applications with OpenSocial that access social network relationships and update feeds. Write your Open Applications using OpenSocial 0.8 JavaScript APIs to tap into the social data of potentially millions of Yahoo! users. As a founding member of the Open Social Foundation, Yahoo! is committed to supporting the complete OpenSocial specification and is working with the community to expand the specification to include OSML and OpenSocial templates.

New Developer Dashboard

Keep an eye on your applications and analyze statistics on My Projects.

Support and Community

Questions and suggestions on the Application Platform are discussed on the Yahoo! Application Platform Developer Community forum. If you have questions or need technical support, please use this forum.