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- This topic has 9 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 16 years, 3 months ago by VvWolverinevV.
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January 8, 2008 at 5:00 pm #28126TechCrunchMember
The unveiling of Yahoo Life as a harbinger of the company’s strategy to incorporate social networking into Yahoo’s existing mail and IM communications systems is a step in the right direction. But you’ve got to wonder what took it so long. The notion that the big Web portals could turn their IM and e-mail contact lists into full-blown social networks is nothing new. AOL tried to do the same thing with AIM Pages with mixed success. Even Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse, who was on stage at CES with Jerry Yang to make the announcement of Yahoo Life, was thinking of this more than a year ago. In fact, I dug out some notes from a meeting I had with him in the fall of 2006 when I asked him whether Yahoo felt threatened by MySpace and social networking in general. His response then was telling:
I think it’s a fad, not the future. The majority of activity [on social networks] is communications. We already have your social network. It is who you are e-mailing. That is the core of my communications, my hub. In my opinion, in 12 to 18 months, we won’t be talking of social networking.He was right about the communications part, but we’re still talking about social networks. And now Yahoo is playing catch-up. You get the sense that Yahoo did not take the threat of social networking seriously until recently. Will Yahoo Life be too little too late or can it make up for its tardiness by leveraging its huge number of active users?
January 9, 2008 at 11:09 pm #166021VvWolverinevVParticipantDoes anyone have any idea about the timeline for this project? And why is Yahoo! developing this in parallel with Mash? They seem very similar.
January 10, 2008 at 1:30 am #166018GandalfMemberNo clue. Seems like they are throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall, then waiting to see what sticks.
January 10, 2008 at 1:40 am #166020YahooliganMemberI think Yahoo Mash is more like a blend of Myspace and Facebook, with an emphasis on the profile, comments and amassing as many so-called friends as possible.
Yahoo Life sounds more like what I would consider legitimate social networking; keeping you connected, but not with a bunch of people you don’t really know and have never met, but with the people you really care about.
January 10, 2008 at 4:17 am #166022VvWolverinevVParticipantMySpace and Facebook only become what you’re describing if you add people who aren’t really your friends. I know all of my Facebook friends much better than I know a lot of my email contacts, so I guess I don’t see the distinctions you see across different social networking sites.
January 11, 2008 at 12:37 am #166016Jeff HesterKeymasterVvWolverinevV, are your Facebook contacts not in your email address book? All of my friends, co-workers, colleages, etc. can be found in my address book, regardless if they are also in Facebook (some are, most are not), Linked-In or any other social network.
January 11, 2008 at 1:29 am #166023VvWolverinevVParticipantNo, I have many friends that I keep in touch with via Facebook and IM that I have never emailed.
January 11, 2008 at 5:59 pm #166017Jeff HesterKeymasterWeird…
January 13, 2008 at 7:32 pm #166019imported_Ven0mMemberSeems to me this may be the new profiling system set to replace Yahoo! 360 and Profiles.
January 13, 2008 at 11:12 pm #166024VvWolverinevVParticipantFrom these screenshots, it looks like whatever it is is intimately tied into Yahoo! Mail.
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