Yahoo may resemble islands of Web properties, but the company is launching a renovation that could turn it into one huge platform. On Thursday, Yahoo announced its Open Strategy at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

“Imagine a world where you can write cipher that will meaningfully reach millions of users in a restricted bound,” wrote Yahoo’s Neal Sample on the company’s Yodel Anecdotal blog.

‘Latent Social Network’

Open Strategy invites developers to use Yahoo’s huge scale, he added, “to write applications that build on our existing properties,” such as Mail, Sports, Search, the front page, mobile, My Yahoo, and others. Yahoo-owned properties plus include the photo-sharing site Flickr, the bookmarking site Del.icio.us, and the social-calendar site Upcoming.

Sample plus noted that, with 500 million rare users spending 235 billion minutes each month on its sites, and with 10 billion relationships in buddy lists and Yahoo address books, the company has “a massive, latent social network.” The

new initiative, he added, will “bring it to the surface.”

In other words, he told news media, Yahoo is not building another social network, but “building social into everything we do.”

He described it as a “rewiring” of Yahoo by building structures that change how its pieces work together. He said developers will be able to take advantage of the “vitality” that will exist within that unified platform. An application written for a Yahoo property will be able to integrate with other properties and with the extended social network.

Example: Search Monkey

An example is Yahoo’s Search Monkey, where developers can blend other goods with search results so that, for instance, an Italian restaurant could have reviews and ratings along with the link to its Web site. Search Monkey officially launches in mid-May.

Charlene Li, an analyst with industry research firm Forrester, wrote on her blog that Yahoo’s rewiring “is…

Orginal post by Top Tech News