October 21, 2008 by Matt Thomas
Over the past months we’ve seen the big search engine players frantically unveiling plans to challenge Google and their dominance of the industry. Microsoft’s plan seems to mainly involve throwing vast sums of money around in an attempt to simply buy up the competition or bribe people to use LiveSearch. Yahoo’s, on the other hand, seems a little more nuanced and innovative.
Essentially what they plan to do is to turn their colossal roster of net services into one huge social network. The plan has been talked about for some time but the details were only made available at the San Francisco Web 2.0 Expo. The scheme is currently known as ‘Yahoo Open Strategy’ and, whilst the name might not be catchy, it really does seem like it’ll be of use.
At the moment you need to create a separate user-profile for most of Yahoo’s different web properties, which is both frustrating and inefficient. YOS will permit Yahoo to centralise profile management allowing users access to all Yahoo applications with the one profile. The next phase will be to introduce various social networking features incorporating things like Yahoo’s hugely popular email and Instant Messenger, as well as more fringe networking apps like MyYahoo and Mash. There is also likely to be a user generated side to the process that is expected to closely resemble Facebook’s application feature.
Only time will tell if this can catch on properly, but the early signs are positive – it does sound pretty cool.
Related posts:
- And so it begins: phase one of Yahoo’s Master Plan
- Yahoo looking to launch social-networking applications for mobile phones
- Yahoo Publisher Network is to be shut down – surprised?
- Yahoo commits to Internet-TV Synergy
- Yahoo to compete with Google and Facebook in data portability
- Apple launches a new music social network
