Google, Yahoo Both Working On Next Generation Social Networks

It’s a busy Sunday evening – first the news on Yahoo Mosh, and now news that Google is working on its own next generation social networking service called Socialstream, possibly to take the spotlight away from the ailing Orkut.

Yahoo Mosh

We don’t know much yet, other than the project exists, it will be launched at mosh.yahoo.com and is being called a “new cool social network product” within Yahoo. No screen shots are available yet. See our earlier post for more.


Google Socialstream

Google Operating System is reporting that Google is sponsoring a project at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute to “rethink and reinvent online social networking.” The project is called Socialstream. Click on the image for a larger view.

The project goal is to “create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.” More information is available deeper in the site:

Socialstream emphasizes improving social connections by making it more efficient to communicate with, share with, and view the social content of all the people in a user’s online social network. Socialstream provides a compelling user experience because it aggregates content across many different networks so a user has a single location to discover new content and communicate. The goal of Socialstream is to present social information in a way that ties it to the person who posted the information, and not the site from which it came.

The feature set and use cases suggest this will be more of an aggregator of existing social networking sites and features. There is absolutely no indication of whether or not this will be productized and launched at this time.

This video gives a good overview of the interface and features:

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-6610704975433050156&hl=en