A little more than 2 years after introducing its open-source platform — Yahoo! Open Strategy (or Y!OS) — Yahoo! has finally rolled out a fantasy sports open API.

Many (perhaps most) of our readers already know what an application programming interface is. For the less tech-savvy folks like me, it gives outsiders access to coding and other “rich data” within the Yahoo! system that allows you to build your own tools for helping within Yahoo! fantasy games.

“You’ll be able to use this data to build non-commercial tools and applications that help analyze draft results, review free agents, optimize current rosters, and more,” Yahoo! says on the profile page for this new API.

Yahoo! has been opening APIs for other portions of its online universe since April 2008 and was receiving requests for such a fantasy offering at least as far back as 2004.

MyFantasyLeague.com has long offered a similar interface for its fantasy-football functionality, a practice that has led to the development of applications such as the Lineup Coach and Draft Coach that produced a business partnership with Tony Holm and FantasySharks.com.

Yahoo!’s fantasy portal is the most-trafficked on the Web, and developers have taken recent cracks at building iPhone apps to streamline mobile access to these games. It’ll be interesting to see how much builds from this open API and how quickly tools might find their way into mass consumption.

Tags: api, fantasy sports, fantasy sports business, fantasy sports industry, yahoo

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Lead Stories, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.