The Biz of Coding

Yahoo! Announces Mobile Social Network Aggregator — Y! OneConnect

by Ujwal Tickoo on February 12th, 2008

Yahoo! has announced Y! One Connect — an application in Yahoo! Go for Mobiles — that will allow Social Network Aggregation. One Connect will launch in Q2 (pdf announcement). Quite as I had predicted Social Network Aggregation will be super hot in 2008.

  Any Immediate Practical value besides the cool factor? Yes! Its not just fun and keeping in touch with family/friends — now you can see jobs uploaded on LinkedIn by people in your network. Very valuable if you are looking for a change passively or even actively. Most Promised features in OneConnect look attractive:

Socially-connected address book - have integrated activity from popular social networks, professional networks, and communities into their address book, keeping it always in sync.

Integrated mobile messaging - SMS & IM integration of conversations in Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger.

Status - View contacts by their most recent status updates on popular social networks — also update your own status

Pulse - Have a dynamic overview of what friends are up to, including recent photos,their status, profile updates, and recommendations based on their most recent actions on popular social networks.

Favorites - contact most accessed friends easily

Social contact card - aggregate the most relevant information on any given contact, including archives of past communications, detailed pulse history, and one-click ways to initiate communication.

Location sensing - Locate, chat with, and exchange contact information with nearby Yahoo! oneConnect users. Proximity alerts will notify consumers when a contact enters their vicinity.

Initial launch will support the following 10 mobile and web based social networks:

• Bebo
• Flickr
• Dopplr
• Facebook 
• Friendster
• hi5
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Twitter

I think mobile social networking has arrived, and Yahoo! has taken an imaginative new step after a long time. I am also sure that several start-ups will 1-up Yahoo! in the release plan. As I had idly wondered, about a couple of weeks ago:

My next best guess: Mobile will play a major role in Social Network Aggregation.

If you like this topic, please go ahead and contribute to the Wikipedia Page on Social Network Aggregation that I started. Overall, I feel this one will be a big win for Yahoo! if they execute. Good job Yahoo! What do you think?

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POSTED IN: Yahoo