Open Services to Open Application Platforms!

Imagine you are an emerging artist with lots of ideas to create beautiful paintings. Now if I give you 2 options:

1. I will give you all the material (paint, canvas, brushes, etc..) and you go create whatever paintings that you want to create and display/market/promote them where ever you want
2. You create a painting in your own workshop using your own materials (I might give you a few tools to help you make the painting even more beautiful - nice frame to put it in, etc..) and bring it to me - I will put in my gallery where thousands/millions/billions of art loving people come to see/buy paintings everyday

Which one would you like the most ? Obviously #2 isn't it ? Materials are something that you can afford on your own (you don't have to be a popular artist to buy this stuff) but getting your art displayed in a popular gallery .. not so easy for many !

That's what exactly is the reason behind why so many providers getting on to the Open Application Platform business. The recent Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) is one such strategy in my opinion. Yeah I can use their Address Book, Mail APIs, Messenger APIs, etc.. to build cool and interesting applications, but how can I get real users find it and use it ? With YAP what ever I build instantly becomes available to millions of users. Obviously this is no different than the platforms that are already available out there (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc..) - but the interesting thing to watch is how end users are going to use it - I don't think Yahoo has any social apps (flickr is one but I don't think there are similar kinds of social circles as you find on others) that are as popular as other social networking sites. As we all know recently with the new UI redesign, at least the Facebook guys kind of deprioritized the importance of Applications on Facebook for several reasons (UI, UX, privacy, etc..). Now we have to see how much control YAP would give the developers control on the UI, position and user data access.

Anyway, I wonder if this is the end of the Open Services era and the start of a new "Applications on the cloud" era. We have already seen the success of iPhone Apps, Google documents are becoming part of day to day work for many instead of MS Office, and many more SaaS based consumer applications.