Yahoo Releases Dev Tools, Including In-App Yahoo Search
Today in San Francisco, Yahoo is holding their first Mobile Developers Conference. With over 1,000 Devs in attendance, Yahoo was quick to roll out a new suite of tools for them to get tucked into. A lot of attention was paid to analytics, where Yahoo's prior acquisition of Flurry is starting to pay off. With some of the tools, Yahoo will give Developers a better avenue to monetize, and even some reach into advertising. Yahoo also made a bold move to ingrain their search engine into apps.
Yahoo's new Mobile Developer Suite consists of five parts. Flurry Analytics with Explorer is an updated analytics tool based on what Flurry was doing pre-Yahoo, while Flurry Pulse lets Developers "share app signals with partners using their existing Flurry SDK implementations and the click of a button".
Yahoo App Publishing is a broad advertising initiative, which lets Developers use Yahoo's app platform to "monetize their apps with high-quality native, video and display ads using the combined capabilities of Yahoo Gemini, BrightRoll and Flurry." The goal is better advertising, which is something we've heard often from Yahoo. To that, Yahoo is also offering up App Marketing via Gemini.
Perhaps the boldest move is the new Yahoo Search in Apps tool, which "makes it easy for developers to integrate Yahoo Search directly into their apps. This enhances the user experience by allowing users to search the web from within the app, and can create an additional monetization channel for developers."
Search is something Yahoo is trying hard to initiate outside of their site proper. They've made headway with Firefox, which supplanted Google with Yahoo Search, natively. Other reports indicate Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer is (or was) trying to have Yahoo end up the default search app for iOS.
Creating a platform for Developers to ingrain Yahoo Search into their apps straight away is interesting, and a smart way to sidestep any issues Yahoo has had in finding a home elsewhere. It's not clear how wide that would proliferate, but if the API was simple enough to integrate into apps, expect your next in-app search to be Yahoo.
Source: Yahoo