Inside Social Games

It wasn’t too long ago that Yahoo decided to rethink its strategy. In an attempt to save the platform, they planned to allow third-party applications to plug into and link Yahoo services and user data. As of today, that vision is now starting to become reality.

Now, the Yahoo platform is becoming more open and social. Yahoo has certainly taken a shift in the social network direction, especially with Mail – which allows you to see updates, emails from various social connections, and built in services such as Flickr and WordPress – and My Yahoo.

Largely due to these new social features, many of the major social game developers made their debut on the Yahoo application platform today. These include companies such as Playfish, Zynga, and RockYou.

This application gallery is still small, but it is definitely going to grow quickly. As it stands, Zynga seems to be the biggest contributor with some of it’s major titles such as Mafia Wars and Bumper Stickers. However, Playfish has also connected its classically popular Bowling Buddies, and RockYou has launched My Emote.

It’s doubtful that any developer will ignore the new Yahoo. Not only is there a large existing user base, but the platform also has extensive developer support. Yahoo offers multiple sources of documentation and various APIs to assist in both editing your applications as well as making them social. Some of the features that Yahoo has made available are the Yahoo Social Directory API, the Updates API, OpenSocial, and access to a support and community forum.

Will Yahoo evolve into a new social network? We’ll see, but as more parts of the Yahoo platform roll out over the coming months, it definitely has the potential to become a big social gaming platform.