Yahoo attempts to hack its way out of its hole

HUNDREDS OF PIMPLY, pizza guzzling, laptop-touting hackers converged on Yahoo’s Sunnyvale campus this weekend for the company’s fourth ‘Hack Day’.

Seizing their chance to get a weekend away from their mothers, 300 hackers took Yahoo up on its offer to take part in the weekend "hackathon", chipping away at Yahoo’s platform and having a fiddle with its free email service.

Having announced a shift to "Open Strategy" last week - something Yahoo believes will save it from joining the ranks of the net dead – this latest gimmick was meant to help the Internet portal spice things up and mesh things around.

Talking to AFP about throwing its doors open to outside developers, Yahoo’s Developer Network chief, Chris Yeh, noted "It is a new course for the ship. Our ability to turn Yahoo from a company that owns and operates its own sites to a company that lets other people in on the action is a critical growth moment. This is really exciting."

Yahoo, which claims to have 500 million users worldwide, reckons it can completely re-invent its outdated homepage over the next few months. This means making the site not only ‘user customizable’ through mini apps developed by the firm itself, but also with apps by third party developers.

A purported 50 "hacks" were achieved at the event along with software inventions galore.

Now the company just has to hope disgruntled shareholders will stop feeling so supremely hacked off about the failed Micro-hoo deal, and everyone will be happy. µ