“However things play out for Pandora as a business, its approach is worth understanding if you’re interested in the future of listening. It’s the “social” theories of music-liking that get most of the attention these days: systems that connect you with friends with similar tastes, or that rely on “collaborative filtering” strategies that cross-match your music-consumption habits with those of like-minded strangers. These popular approaches marginalize traditional gatekeepers; instead of trusting the talent scout, the radio programmer or the music critic, you trust your friends (actual or virtual), or maybe just “the crowd.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/magazine/18Pandora-t.html?em

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/04/introducing_the_1.html

Y!OS platforms will harness Yahoo!’s unique strengths – our rich and relevant user experiences (we’re #1 in 7 verticals), our massive audience (half a billion users/month), and our deep data repositories (content, content, content) – and open them to the innovations of the developer community. Our aim: to fundamentally transform how people experience Yahoo!.

With Y!OS, we’re moving from a model in which each Yahoo! property develops much of its own technology to one where we share common data and frameworks that can be easily surfaced across multiple Yahoo! properties and off the Yahoo.com network.

It’s a major rewiring of Yahoo!.

And the good news for developers is that Y!OS will allow you to access to these assets, build applications around them, and then get distribution on Yahoo!’s monumentally popular properties (and/or use them in your own websites).

includes: 

• A Single Social Platform for Yahoo!
• Lotsa Standardized Web Services
• The Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP)