By David Chartier
As perhaps one of the company's largest moves toward distinguishing itself from Microsoft's culture and acquisition intentions, Yahoo today outlined a long-expected plan to turn its empire of web services into a massive social network for world social network domination.
At the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco, Yahoo's CTO Ari Balogh unveiled "Yahoo Open Strategy," the company's umbrella term for a couple of social networking initiatives in mind. At the heart of the move, however, is an effort to unite the myriad of profiles users have to create and manage across Yahoo's various properties. "Right now you manage different bits of personal information in different places and to some extent it is a fragmented user experience" said Neal Sample, Yahoo's chief technical architect, according to Reuters.
Once Yahoo introduces its centralized profile management system, Balogh explained it can then begin drawing the lines between its various properties and introducing social networking features. Yahoo's market-leading e-mail and popular IM services are obvious launch pads for users to begin building their networks, and other socially focused services like MyYahoo and Mash will be rolled into the eventual feature set Yahoo plans to offer. Yahoo's plans to consolidate services and retire others in favor of streamlining the new platform will be key in providing a smooth and appealing experience.
Another key aspect to Yahoo's new social networking strategy will be user-generated applications. Like Facebook's application platform, Yahoo plans to leverage Google's OpenSocial and even its own forthcoming Yahoo Application Platform, allowing third-parties to create apps that interact across its services. In fact, Yahoo wants to clean up its profile system, then work with third parties to build that aspect of the platform, before flipping the social switch for consumers. Considering the ambitions of all this, Balogh says we may not actually see the end results of Yahoo's Skynet social platform until 2009.
You got your social in my privacy
With 500 million monthly active users across its properties, however, Yahoo Open Strategy could become an incredibly powerful and profitable move for Yahoo—if executed correctly. While the company took a strong first step into the social space by purchasing properties like Flickr and del.icio.us years ago, everyone has been waiting to see what the company would actually do with them ever since. Yahoo Open Strategy may be the answer we've all been waiting for.
Another significant obstacle Yahoo faces is the very user base it hopes to leverage with all this. As Facebook had to learn when introducing some of its more controversial features in recent memory, users sometimes have very particular ideas about what they want to share, with whom, and how. If Yahoo Open Strategy isn't executed properly, the company could have millions of e-mail users on its hands who are wondering—or even upset—as to why they're suddenly sharing all sorts of other personal information with casual acquaintances or, worse yet, hostile coworkers.
That said, Balogh did state during his presentation that Yahoo has privacy on the to-do list, and it's paying attention to the way users want control over what they share.
Will you Yahoo?
For a comparison, MySpace and Facebook have around 110 million and 60 million active users, respectively. With Yahoo's stockpile of 500 million users and a virtual warehouse of established brands and services, however, it already has much of the groundwork laid for what could quite possibly become the world's largest social network virtually overnight.
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