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Jerry Yang: Annual Yahoo shareholder meeting at San Jose, Will it be a typical snoozer meeting?

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:August 1, 2008

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is facing a long series of serious criticisms and he will face a tough crowd t Friday’s shareholders meeting. The company’s stock closed at $19.18 the day before Microsoft launched its attempt to acquire Yahoo, soared immediately afterward to near $30, but since then has dropped back down below $20. But Microsoft’s unusual behavior over the last few weeks has taken a different form: for the first time, perhaps since the Netscape threat arose in the early 1990s, Microsoft is acting scared.

“There is a lot of anger and discontent among shareholders. It will be lively tomorrow,” said IDC analyst Karsten Weide.

If you’re in the Bay Area, I encourage you to come out to the meeting at the Fairmont San Jose on Friday at 10am local time. (I will be traveling from the east coast to attend the meeting and know that several others are coming from long distances as well. Hopefully, we’ll have a lively set of questions posed to the Yahoo! board in a true direct fashion since the titanic negotiations with Microsoft and also since Jerry Yang took over after last year’s annual meeting.) says Eric Jackson

- Jerry Yang repleaced CEO Terry Semel in mid-2007
- Yahoo’s stock price was in the US$27 to $28 range
- Activist investor Eric Jackson, president of Ironfire Capital, plans to attend.
- Carl Icahn wanted to kick out the entire board.
- top management changes can announced at the meeting or shortly afterward
- ambitious project is Yahoo Open Strategy (Y OS) future also based on this meeting.

Yahoo Open Strategy (Y OS) includes:

A Single Social Platform for Yahoo!

The Social Platform will enable a single social “connective tissue” across all Yahoo! experiences letting users view Yahoo! through a relevant social lens. The Social Platform isn’t yet another social networking vertical from Yahoo!. It’s a common social infrastructure that will span all of Yahoo! and the web beyond. We’ll start by collapsing the Y! 360 and Mash connection lists into one social repository (and add a new user interface to it), then we’ll take a proactive approach to tapping into the TEN BILLION aggregate relationships in Mail, Messenger, Address Book, and other social areas of Yahoo! to recommend connections to our users. Plus, we’ll begin surfacing users’ profile and connection information throughout Yahoo! as the whole Yahoo! network becomes more social, which will motivate users to activate connections. Developers will gain access to this Social Platform via RESTful APIs, giving you ways to query for a user’s profile data and connections data (our Social API), ways to update a user’s presence across the network (Presence API), and an activity stream with an API for reading/writing a user’s activity (we call this “Updates”).

Lotsa Standardized Web Services

You want data? Have we got data for you! And we’ll be delivering a lot more of it in the coming months. We’re working to get it to you in ways that won’t require “RTFM” every time we release new APIs. We’ve created a RESTful API standard to which most new Yahoo! API releases will adhere, including all of the Social Platform APIs mentioned above. And some more news: we’ll be supporting OAuth – look for the OAuth Consumer Key to replace the YDN App ID for new API signups here on the developer website very soon.

The Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP)

So now you have an out-of-the-box social graph, and wicked cool data to mashup. How about some traffic? How about some traffic from Yahoo! Mail, the Yahoo! Front Page, Yahoo! Search, My Yahoo! and the revamped Y! Profile? The Yahoo! Application Platform will allow developers to build applications that plug directly into these Yahoo! pages and properties, starting today with an exciting developer’s preview release into Yahoo! Search called Search Monkey.

As Yahoo! is a member of the OpenSocial Foundation, YAP supports OpenSocial. Apps you’ve written for other OpenSocial-compliant application platforms should function on Yahoo! with minimal tweaking (and vice versa) — or you can write apps that go directly to the Social Platform REST APIs; it’s up to you. And YAP offers you the choice of hosting your app with Yahoo! or using your own server to proxy your app back to us.

CEO Jerry Yang’s compensation package?
yo-yo-ing share price?
Microsoft’s attempted acquisition, hostile takeover of Yahoo?

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