Yahoo announced that it is working to build social aspects into everything
that it does. Yahoo Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh said, “We are not
building another social network. We are building social into everything we
do."
Yahoo is attempting to improve its user experience at the same time it is
facing a looming battle for control of Yahoo with Microsoft. Microsoft made an
unsolicited bid to purchase Yahoo for more than $44B that was turned
down by the Yahoo board as undervaluing the company.
Yahoo says that it intends to make
sharing information by its users easier while at the same time assuring
that information a user doesn’t want to share isn't provided to other Yahoo
members. The plan will allow users to share information about themselves not
only on Yahoo’s site but on other sites that run applications using Yahoo
features.
Balogh says that Yahoo estimates there are 10 billion latent social
connections that exist between its 500 million monthly visitors including email
address, instant messenger buddy lists and address books. Yahoo wants to make
this information easier to share. The broad umbrella for Yahoo’s plan is called
the “Yahoo Open Strategy.”
Chief technical architect of the Yahoo Open Strategy plan, Neal Sample, told
Reuters, “Right now you manage
different bits of personal information in different places and to some extent
it is a fragmented user experience.”
Balogh continued, “Social is not a destination -- it's a dimension and it
will infuse all aspects of a consumer's experience on the Web.”
The hope for Yahoo is that making information easier to share will help
Yahoo better compete against not only other search engines like MSN and Google,
but against social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace as well.