Tearing a page out of the social networking playbook, Yahoo has decided to appeal to developers to help build stickiness for its offerings.

By releasing the source code for a number of its web properties and functionalities, CEO Jerry Yang's team hopes to generate a comeback for the brand that models Facebook's jump in traffic since it liberated its back-end code.

Businessweek reports that a beta version of the new My Yahoo site already enables users to link to Gmail. The New York Times and Netflix have also released widgets on the destination, allowing consumers to read stories from customized home pages and rent films.