Google, Yahoo creating new social networks- report
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Blog: Bloggers report that Google and Yahoo are creating new social networks to try to get back in the game since their existing services haven't gained widespread adoption
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(InfoWorld) - As if Yahoo didn't have enough trouble already in social networking, a company public relations representative tipped a New York Times reporter by mistake about a new, unannounced service called Yahoo Mash. Recounting the faux pas in a New York Times blog Wednesday, Brad Stone reported that a Yahoo PR representative sent him an e-mail saying he had set up a profile for Stone in Yahoo Mash. After Stone clicked on an e-mail link to visit the profile, he couldn't get past a log-in page. Yahoo representatives later acknowledged to Stone that the service isn't yet open to anyone outside of Yahoo and that the invitation was sent by mistake. They didn't provide him with more details about Yahoo Mash. Considering that the service apparently includes the creation of profiles for individuals, it would be safe to assume it is some sort of social network, an area where Yahoo officials have acknowledged the company is weak. TechCrunch, a technology news site that focuses on the Web 2.0 space, reported in July that Yahoo has been secretly working on a new social-networking project called Mosh. What's not a secret is that the Yahoo 360 social network, introduced in March 2005, has been a disappointment. Several times over the past year, high-ranking Yahoo executives have publicly acknowledged this and indicated the service needs a major overhaul. Yahoo 360 doesn't appear in a top 10 list of social-networking sites in the U.S. released Thursday by Nielsen/NetRatings. That list of the most popular social-networking sites with U.S. users during August, is topped by News Corp.'s MySpace with 60.3 million unique visitors. Facebook, which Yahoo reportedly tried unsuccessfully to buy last year for $1 billion, came in second with 19.2 million unique visitors, a robust 117 percent increase over August of last year, outpacing MySpace's 23 percent growth clip. Yahoo's weak position in social networking is baffling and has been a source of sharp criticism for the company's top managers. They have been blamed for being asleep at the wheel while MySpace, initially as a startup, went on a tear in the social-networking space; for launching a weak product; and also for being unable or unwilling to buy Facebook or another strong competitor. Yahoo does have other, more successful social-media sites like social-bookmarking site Delicious, photo-sharing site Flickr, and question-and-answer search engine Yahoo Answers. However, it is generally agreed that it needs a strong contender in social networking, one of the hottest types of online services in recent years. Yahoo didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.
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Borrowing a page from Sun's Java playbook, Google is announcing a way for programmers to build social applications for multiple Web sites at once.
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YouTube, the video social-networking website owned by Google, is building a vast network of content providers, a company spokesman told AFP.
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Yahoo! makes alliances to fend off Google.
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Following a recent industry trend, Internet giant Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) is adding new search engine tools that will enable users to create personal folders and share their favorite links with others.
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Internet giant Yahoo is introducing new search engine tools that will enable users to create personal folders and share their favorite links with others.
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Yahoo is working on a mobile service called oneConnect designed to aggregate contacts and communications around what it calls a &quot;socially connected address book.&quot;The service, due to launch in the second quarter this year, will be open and other companies are free to join, Yahoo said Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.OneConnect draws information from social-networking sites such as MySpace, instant-messaging services such as Yahoo Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger, and e-mail services including Yahoo Mail and Google&#39;s Gmail to build a picture of the mood, location, and activities of friends and colleagues.It also stores details of recent communications with address-book contacts, including instant-messaging and e-mail exchanges. All the information held about a person can be viewed on a &quot;social contact card.&quot;Location data is calculated by GPS (Global Positioning System) in handsets that have it, or deduced from nearby cell tower locations. Users of the service can keep their locations private, or opt to share that information with others.Combining all the information gathered by the service allows Yahoo to alert users of the service when friends arrive in town, or to let them follow up on unfinished business when colleagues become available.&quot;I can see all my communications archives so when someone comes up to me, I know whether I answered his last e-mail,&quot; said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo&#39;s Connected Life division, who demonstrated the service at an MWC news conference.Yahoo oneConnect is built on the same widget platform that Yahoo used for its oneSearch mobile search service, so it will work on some 300 phones, either in a browser, as a Java applet or as a native application.Boerries demonstrated how oneConnect can extract information about the status and activities of members of a social network on other services such as MySpace.With some of those services, he said, Yahoo developed the code to exchange the information, while other partners chose to develop the bridge themselves.&quot;We don&#39;t want to be competing to build a better Facebook client,&quot; he said.In one case, though, the intervention of a neutral party was necessary to get both sides talking. Although oneConnect can collect information from Microsoft Exchange e-mail accounts, the connector was written by Dataviz, a third-party software developer specializing in data translation. Microsoft recently made an unsolicited offer to purchase Yahoo, and the two companies are engaged in a war of words over the value of the bid, which may turn hostile.Opening up the social network to other services will allow Yahoo to bulk up in its battle with Google for the attention of Internet users. But Google is also a potential partner for the service: the beta version of oneConnect gathers information from Google Talk and Gmail.The service sends large amounts of data to and from the mobile phone -- the demonstration paused often with a message indicating that data was being exchanged. While unlimited data services are common in the U.S., they are less so in Europe, making the service potentially expensive to use.Boerries acknowledged that data rates could be a problem, adding that Yahoo is negotiating with operator partners to introduce all-inclusive data tariffs for the service.In return, those partners could benefit from a share of the advertising revenue generated by Yahoo&#39;s online services, he said.To conclude his demonstration, Boerries announced &quot;one more thing,&quot; acknowledging that he had stolen the line from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.That thing was an iPhone running oneConnect as a native application, linked to contact information in the iPhone address book.&quot;It&#39;s a prototype, because there is no SDK [software development kit]. We had some eager developers who used Jailbreak to open up the iPhone,&quot; Boerries said, referring to the way in which iPhones must be hacked if they are to run applications not approved by Apple. Jobs has said an SDK will be made available to would-be iPhone application developers later this month.
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Several Web 2.0 tools unveiled by IBM have advanced the growing options for business-based social networking and data mashups.
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Online journals, or weblogs, have put together a series of developments which suggest that the search engine is developing new web tools.
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A new study says the big social networking sites are splitting up along familiar lines.
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The end of the year is approaching, and that means it is time for Google's yearly look at what we've all been searching for. Topping that list were two social networking sites, and an appetite for news on the ever-controversial Paris Hilton.
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For business or pleasure? Reg Technology Panel Over the past two or three years, zanily named social networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr and Twitter seem to have come from nowhere to wheedle their way into just about every aspect of online life, both in business and pleasure. Such facilities share a handful of simple, but powerful core features: each will enable information sharing of some form, will have some kind of community orientation and will be constructed in a way that several of the blighters can be merged (or should I say, âmashed upâ) into clever, multifaceted concoctions of collaborative capability.â¦
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Someday soon, you might be &quot;Mashed&quot; by your friends. Yahoo has leaked information about an alpha version of a new social-networking site it is creating, called Mash, where users can customize each other&#39;s profiles.
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Yahoo Inc  is testing an  experimental social network service called Mash that makes it  easy for Yahoo users to share tidbits of their lives with  friends and family online, the company said on Sunday.
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Yahoo launched a new service designed to let users of its search engine save and manage their query results for accessing later and sharing with others, the company said Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo has started testing a social-network component for Yahoo Answers, a search engine in which people post questions and answers that have become a highly popular service for theÂ company. On Thursday, Yahoo Answers Network debuted as a beta service designed to let the 90 million users of this question-and-answer search engine create "personal networks" with each other. They can also invite acquaintances who don't use Yahoo Answers to join their network. People will be able to see if other members of their Yahoo Answers network have posted an answer or a question or flagged someone else's question as interesting, according to Yahoo. Yahoo plans to continue enhancing Yahoo Answers Network with features like the ability to block and ignore users and to import contacts from other services like the Yahoo Messenger instant messaging network. The move is consistent with Yahoo's aggressive strategy in social computing, a hallmark of the Web 2.0 era. In recent years, Yahoo has been busy acquiring social-computing companies like Flickr, del.icio.us, and, more recently, MyBlogLog as well as revamping existing sites and services with social features like tagging and user-generated content. Yahoo Answers is a bright spot for the company. Archrival Google had a competing service called Google Answers that never took off and was put out to pasture last year. In late December of last year, market researcher Hitwise Pty. reported that among Q&A-type search engines, Yahoo Answers held a 96 percent of share of visits in the U.S. Answerbag ranked second with 2.04 percent, and Microsoft's Windows Live Q&A came in third with 1.02 percent. By giving this new feature to Yahoo Answers, with its large and growing audience, Yahoo might be able to improve its standing in social networking. Its blogging and social networking-site Yahoo 360, introduced in March 2005, hasn't become as popular as Yahoo expected. In November at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo's vice president of product strategy, said the company might remake Yahoo 360, but the company hasn't rolled out any significant enhancements to it yet. Last year there were insistent rumors that Yahoo was shopping around for a social-networking site and that it held conversations with Facebook that didn't yield a deal. However, Yahoo has massive numbers of users in services like Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Mail, Flickr, del.icio.us and Yahoo Photos that some analysts have pointed out could be leveraged to create social networks. Yahoo Answers Network could indicate a strategy focused on creating distinct social networks within individual and already popular services, rather than on having a single social-networking site that competes head to head with the likes of MySpace.com, Friendster and Facebook. In fact, new social-networking providers are targeting their sites toward specific audiences and topics, instead of trying to cast a broad net like MySpace.com and the other leaders in this market. More information about Yahoo Answers Network can be found here.