Yahoo just sent us a set of press materials talking up the buzzword of the moment - Openness. In fact, the press materials were pretty short; they were only around ten paragraphs or so. They used the word (or a derivative of the word) 'open' in it close to forty times, though.
Don't get me wrong - both of these new offerings from Yahoo have the potential to be very cool. The new Yahoo Buzz looks like it implements the best of several worlds as a virtual mash-up of Google News, Techmeme and Digg. Similarly, if the new Yahoo search works anything like the demonstrations of Collarity's Behavioral Relevance Engines I've seen, Yahoo could be buying their ticket back into the search game.
Here's the deal, though: neither product has much of anything to do with 'open,' and I can't say I appreciate the framing of it as such. Open with relation to search (especially when you're talking about a system that does behavioral tracking) would be ownership, or at least exportability of my attention data from which the tracking algorithm derives its judgments of me.
Similarly, the new Yahoo! Buzz isn't so much of an open system as it is at its core, a memetracker. Memetrackers by their very nature are sucking in user generated content and usually bits of mainstream press as well. That my blog may end up within their Buzz Index doesn't make it open - just accurate. Open is a concept that really doesn't much apply to the concept, unless they want me to be able to export, again, my profile and attention data to other social networks or to source XML code.