Google, Yahoo creating new social networks- reports
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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) - 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.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo Inc. has launched a service called Pipes designed to let regular users mix different RSS and Atom feeds and create data "mashups," a process that so far has required programming knowledge. Pipes features a drag-and-drop interface that the company hopes non-technical users will find simple and intuitive as they manipulate content syndication feeds to combine data in new and useful ways. An example of a Pipe is this one , which meshes listings from Craigslist with data from Yahoo's local search engine to display apartments for rent near any business, Yahoo said. Another one collates news about topics chosen by the user from a variety of sources. "Pipes' initial set of modules lets you assemble personalized information sources out of existing Web services and data feeds. Pipes outputs standard RSS 2.0, so you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. You can also create pipes that accept user input and run them on our servers as a kind of miniature Web application," reads Yahoo's description of the service , posted Wednesday night. While Pipes today lets users mix data from RSS and Atom feeds, Yahoo hopes to extend the service to support other data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings, Yahoo said. For example, Yahoo will open up access to the Pipes engine to programmers and add support for the KML data source, which is used to display geographic data in Google Inc.'s popular Google Earth mapping application and Google Maps Web site. The initial response from observers has been enthusiastic. "Yahoo's new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the Internet," Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of computer book publisher O'Reilly Media Inc., wrote on his blog . "While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the Web into a programmable environment for everyone." The Pipes Web site, available throughout this morning, was nonetheless down at press time, displaying the message: "Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!"
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Search Engine Journal is pleased to announce that we have a new contributor who will be covering search oriented marketing and news centering around viral and social media platforms, John Boyle. John is the author of the SocialNext blog, where he covers &#8220;the next generation of marketing via viral video and social networks like MySpace.&#8221; Based in [...]
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New site doses social networking with literate lists. Plus: Is
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Hoover's Inc. today launched a social networking site to help business people connect with friends and colleagues and to establish new connections.
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Blog: The social networking company plans to launch an API to connect to other services.
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By Maria Puente  Think teens and twentysomethings hog all the online attention? Time to shove the teenyboppers aside: It's Grandma and grandkids -- some too young to read -- who are forging the newest interactive social networks in cyberspace.
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No doubt, Google and Yahoo! are great search engines. Google is great in speed and straightforward search results, while Yahoo! excels in integration of services.
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It looks like the social-networking world has moved on from Google's yet-to-launch developer initiative, but top engineers and partners say give it time.
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A new Yahoo service called Pipes will let regular users mix different RSS and Atom feeds and create data "mashups."
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Study exposes emerging tribes of social network sites
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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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Google and Facebook join DataPortability WorkGroup, improving social network portability but raising privacy concerns.
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As previously announced, the popular social-networking site joined other sites in opening its platform to outside developers -- and potentially opening it to applications that could reach into enterprises.
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A report coming from the Inside Facebook blog today details three new features that may be making their debut in the first few months of 2008.