Wow. I hate how Yahoo is hopping on the short bus and trying to launch all kinds of social networking services from scratch. It’s strikes me as lunacy when they are sitting on one of the largest “social graphs”, email. They’ve got over 250 million registered users (Gmail’s around 50) and refuse to do anything with them except provide 98% of the service Gmail does. Heck, they’ve even got all the connections made from people emailing each other. Use it as a platform.
Yahoo needs to leverage these users and feed them into the other services. However, despite BBauth, Yahoo has no overall account management system similar to Googles. Joe Yahoo still have to discover services on their own. Yahoo should reorganize their whole operation around a Yahoo account management, offering plug-n-play services to their users. Use bookmarks? Sign up for Delicious. Photos? Flickr. Sports? Stocks? Sign them up.
Yahoo Mail is a perfect user base to leverage for Yahoo’s new services, but still seems largely untapped.
September 4th, 2007 at 7:15 am
I completely agree and never really thought about this huge opportunity for Yahoo. It seems like things there are really getting shaken up there, so maybe Hilary Schneider will read this and you’ll see Yahoo quickly start capitalizing on these users.
Now, if only they had a few more good social networking apps to apply to their user base.
September 12th, 2007 at 12:18 am
What a great point! So much talk about Facebook being the OS of Web 2.0 and all of the apps people are building: Yahoo! calls them Yahoo! Widgets (and Flickr, IM, Videos, etc, etc). All they need is a social networking friendly centralized structure and it seems they’d be on their way.
So many have argued that Myspace and Facebook are age/generation specific. That our kids aren’t going to have Facebook accounts, it’ll be something else. I have no idea if I’ll visit or care about my Facebook or Myspace accounts in 5 years, but I’ve had my Yahoo! email/IM for longer than that and I’ll most likely have them both for a lot longer.
Thanks for the post, Nick!
November 14th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
[…] like to think that Yahoo top brass reads my blog religiously, but I’m sure this whole email social network thing was in the works for a while… See Mike’s post on Yahoo’s Inbox 2.0. Too bad they […]