Yahoo shows off oneConnect social address book
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InfoWorld - Yahoo is working on a mobile service called oneConnect designed to aggregate contacts and communications around what it calls a "socially connected address book."
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Thanks to a clean, easy-to-use interface, a brand-new social networking site may edge out its competitors. Invite your friends to Thanksgiving dinner the easy way. In Monkey Bites.
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New social networking site lets users share photos, videos, and more.
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It's kind of like Facebook's feed for people who don't do Facebook. http://friendfeed.com/davew  It seems pretty cool.
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UPDATE: Yahoo user names and passwords can soon be used to access Web sites that support the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework.
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InfoWorld - Yahoo will sell display advertising for Bebo, the first such deal Yahoo has secured with a&#160;social networking site, the companies said on Wednesday.
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Plaxo, which makes software for  PC users to keep address books up-to-date, said on Sunday it is  helping millions of members open up their online datebooks to  build social networks like MySpace or Facebook.
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Photophlow enlivens the Flickr experience with photo-sharing chat rooms--and shows what the Yahoo photo-sharing could be. Next up: a new face on Facebook.
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Location-based services appeared here, there, and everywhere at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, as service providers maneuvered to take advantage of the increasing number of mobile phones shipping with integrated GPS (Global Positioning System) modules. Many of the services put the emphasis on finding your friends, not finding your way, as GPS evolves into more of a social tool.Yahoo announced a service called oneConnect&#160;that will to alert you when contacts arrive in town, warn you what mood they are in and show you a list of their recent e-mail messages that you have left unanswered. Yahoo intends to collect this information by combining status updates from sites like MySpace with GPS data from mobile phones and other information from Web mail and instant messaging services, a kind of aggregation for social networks. The service will go live by June, and will work with services including Google&#39;s Gmail and GoogleTalk, AOL Instant Messenger, and Microsoft&#39;s Outlook Web mail, said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo&#39;s Connected Life division.Communology, of Cologne, Germany, promoted a similar notion of social-network aggregation. Its&#160;Mobile Mash-Up&#160;can help sites like Facebook or Xing offer mobile users the ability to locate friends or tag photos with information about where they were taken. Communology sells &quot;white label&quot; services, using its Live Media software platform to build social-networking services for other brands.Linking up with Facebook is a strategy that also occurred to Wayfinder: it now offers a GPS widget for Facebook users called LocateMate. The company also introduced a forum for users of its software to share favorite routes and locations at&#160;MyWayfinder.com, with links to digital mapping tools such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth.GyPSii showed a BlackBerry client for its mobile social-networking service. It already offers versions for handsets running Symbian OS and Windows Mobile. The service allows users to share photos, videos and other information, tagging it with location data. Last year, GyPSii, based in Amsterdam, acquired Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Benefon, one of the first to build GPS modules into mobile phones.One of the strangest location-based mobile social networks revealed at the show allows users to share information about ... public toilets. MizPee.eu offers reviews of toilets in Barcelona, London, Paris and Rome posted by community members, with ratings for cleanliness and cost. Showgoers hoping to use the site to beat the long lines for toilets on site were disappointed, though: the nearest one listed is 1.45 kilometers from the showground.
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When an attendee at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday learned that the Caramel bar at the Bellagio hotel had mistakenly given someone else his corporate credit card, he didn&#39;t call American Express.Instead, he went to his room, fired up the Internet and searched his social networking sites to figure out where he might locate the person at the conference, using the name given to him by the Bellagio staff, which still had the other man&#39;s American Express card.The attendee, who asked not to be named, used his LinkedIn social-networking account to find out that the person he was looking for worked for wireless networking company Netgear and was also a CES attendee. He used this information to leave a voicemail message for the person at his office and send him an e-mail, and went to Netgear&#39;s booth to try to locate him. Eventually, the attendee was able to retrieve his card when the person who had it by mistake returned his messages.As the popularity of social-networking sites grows, so does the opportunity for Web users to access information about people both inside and outside their personal networks. While that information in and of itself can have relevancy in specific situations -- such as in the case of the attendee who lost his credit card -- not all of it is useful or interesting to either the users on the site or the advertisers who support the site&#39;s revenue structure.Now that social networks have reached a critical mass of users, their next challenge is to ensure they can continue to provide value to users and advertisers beyond giving people a crowd of online friends to boast about. At CES this week, executives from companies such as Yahoo, AOL, and iMeem discussed the next step for social networks as they continue to evolve and serve the changing needs of their communities.David Liu, senior vice president of social media, messaging and homepages at AOL, said Tuesday at CES that the key to the success of social networks is that they allow people to tell their &quot;stories&quot; online to make connections that can exist both online and in real life. Communities that allow people to do this in a user-friendly way will have the most success in the long run, he said.&quot;There&#39;s a tremendous opportunity for the community to do this the right way,&quot; Liu said. &quot;I think the networks that will be successful and grow will be the ones that allow people to tell these stories in their own words with the most open ... platforms possible.&quot;However, the expectations of users differ from those of advertisers, and companies running those sites must serve them both. So while users may find personal information -- such as someone&#39;s vacation photos -- interesting and useful, advertisers probably will not, unless they help them target ads to those users.So far, the information gleaned from social networks has been largely untapped by advertisers, said Steve Jang, chief marketing officer and head of business development for social-networking site iMeem. iMeem provides a social-networking site based primarily on people&#39;s music interests, letting users post playlists and stream music and video content for free.There are a couple of reasons advertisers have not been able to take full advantage of targeted advertising on social networks, according to Jang. One is that people have been putting user-generated content into three buckets -- &quot;one that is not that great or interesting to the user or advertiser, one that is mildly interesting and one that is universally well-received,&quot; Jang said. He said advertisers and social networking companies should broaden their preconceived notions of user-generated content to find new ways to create the right kind of advertising for their communities.Another reason it&#39;s been difficult to target ads is the &quot;creepy&quot; factor, said Alex Blum, CEO, of KickApps, which provides software for building online communities and social networks. He cited the controversy surrounding Facebook&#39;s Beacon online advertising engine, which reported users online behavior back to the company even when they weren&#39;t logged into the site.But there are other ways advertisers can glean information from social-networking sites and leverage &quot;a tremendous opportunity that isn&#39;t viewed as creepy&quot; to target users with ads, Blum said. By knowing what people like to do by viewing their publicly available tastes in books, music and films, companies can tailor ads related to those interests without making users feel as if their online behavior is being tracked, he said.Some factors that will contribute to the successful evolution of social networks are out of the control of the companies running those sites, said Leonard Brody, CEO and co-founder of NowPublic.com.Brody&#39;s organization collects information from citizen journalists and redistributes it on the Web, and has used Facebook as a way to gather information about news as it happens from people in online communities. Many people have not realized the power of online communities beyond their mere social aspects, he said, but once that changes those networks eventually will affect other areas of culture, such as the way people report and receive news.&quot;We look at these social networks the same way we look at Miami, London, and Dubai,&quot; he said. &quot;(Facebook) is a city, and an incredible vehicle for people to create micro niches around news that is important to them.&quot;
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IBM has released a corporate social networking visualization and analysis tool designed to help people better navigate their personal and corporate social networks.
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Blog: A database shoots out an email solicitation using the name of a friend in the hospital
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360! take! two! Yahoo! has launched a new social networking site, its second such foray into the field.â¦
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Yahoo is moving in a big way to embrace the new OpenID 2.0 specification, which eliminates the need for Web surfers to create separate IDs and logins at each of the Web sites, blogs and profile pages that they may visit during an online session.
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By Anick Jesdanun  NEW YORK - The operators of the online hangout site Facebook.com wanted to help users save time by highlighting changes their friends make to their personal profile pages. Instead, the new feature has drawn complaints from thousands of users and even threats of a boycott.
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Yahoo, disconcertingly unable to&#160;develop a popular social networking site, will try to accentuate the social networking capabilities of Yahoo Messenger when it releases on Tuesday a beta upgrade of this widely used instant messaging service.Among its new features, Yahoo Messenger 9.0 will allow people to invite friends to watch videos or flip through photo albums in real time, sharing those activities as if they were sitting side by side in one&#39;s living room.Made possible by what Yahoo calls an &quot;in-line media player,&quot; this feature is one of several new ones designed to boost interactions among Messenger users.Another such feature is a redesigned &quot;friends&quot; list that provides more space for each contact entry and makes it easier to establish an IM, voice or SMS link with another user.Now the question is whether Yahoo plans to leverage the more than 94 million people who use Messenger and build a social network around that base, giving the company, finally, an answer to MySpace and Facebook.While she wouldn&#39;t provide a direct answer to this question, Sabrina Ellis, vice president of Yahoo Messenger, acknowledged that the service has an inherent social networking component.&quot;In some ways, if you look at it, Yahoo Messenger is a social network in that people have actually defined who their friends are and these are people they communicate with,&quot; Ellis said.The new features, such as the ability to share and watch videos virtually together, will let people deepen their interactions on Yahoo Messenger beyond what has been possible so far, she said.&quot;These elements will really help people develop relationships and expand some of their friendships,&quot; Ellis said.According to comScore, last month Yahoo Messenger had 94.3 million unique users, up almost 30 percent from September 2006 and second worldwide to Microsoft&#39;s Windows Live Messenger with almost 227 million.Still, Yahoo hasn&#39;t been able to find its groove in social networking. It recently announced it will phase out its social networking site Yahoo 360 and migrate its features and content to a &quot;universal profile system&quot; that will more closely tie Yahoo&#39;s various online services together.Asked how Yahoo Messenger will fit within this integrated, centralized platform, Ellis said the IM service will be part of that effort, along with Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Answers and other services.&quot;We&#39;re committed to making sure that all of our users can benefit from all different Yahoo services,&quot; she said.Other new features in the beta version of Yahoo Messenger 9.0 include the following:-- Localized versions for the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India (in Hindi), and Vietnam-- The ability to transfer files of any size, lifting a 1GB limit-- Call forwarding, to send calls from Yahoo Messenger to a mobile phone or landline as a voicemail-- The ability to share photo sets from Yahoo&#39;s Flickr service in real time
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Vapps, a US company that provides free conference calling via the Internet, announced that it would be adding the feature to Yahoo's online message service.