Yahoo Life Has Been A Long Time Coming
Erick Schonfeld
26 comments »
The unveiling of Yahoo Life (which is not the official name) as a harbinger of the company’s strategy to incorporate social networking into Yahoo’s existing mail and IM communications systems is a step in the right direction. But you’ve got to wonder what took it so long. The notion that the big Web portals could turn their IM and e-mail contact lists into full-blown social networks is nothing new. AOL tried to do the same thing with AIM Pages with mixed success. Even Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse, who was on stage at CES with Jerry Yang to make the announcement of Yahoo Life, was thinking of this more than a year ago. In fact, I dug out some notes from a meeting I had with him in the fall of 2006 when I asked him whether Yahoo felt threatened by MySpace and social networking in general. His response then was telling:
I think it’s a fad, not the future. The majority of activity [on social networks] is communications. We already have your social network. It is who you are e-mailing. That is the core of my communications, my hub. In my opinion, in 12 to 18 months, we won’t be talking of social networking.
He was right about the communications part, but we’re still talking about social networks. And now Yahoo is playing catch-up. You get the sense that Yahoo did not take the threat of social networking seriously until recently. Will Yahoo Life be too little too late or can it make up for its tardiness by leveraging its huge number of active users?
Yahoo! will be interesting, but I think Google has most of the early adopters and whatever they do will likely blow Yahoo! out of the water.
If their first and foremost priority is to support OpenID, then let everyone with an Open ID two-click join the new social network ( whether they have a Yahoo ID or not ) then “hell yes” they can succeed. This is also a chance for a big company to support data portability and User Data Rights.
If Yahoo isn’t talking about Flickr in their social network strategy, then they’re hedging their bets, and that’s not likely to succeed. In effect, Yahoo is telegraphing the fact that they’re not really very serious about it. Flickr (and Upcoming) is by far the best chance that Yahoo has to grow further in this space - guess what, it’s already a social network with a thriving community built in.
How about more cross-platform support? Google has been supporting all platforms (Win, Mac, and Linux/UNIX) for quite a while. Much of Yahoo!’s website is Win-only (like their Launchcast Music). Their website also is very slow, JS heavy, and not very appealing.
What is tiring with my TechCrunch fellow readers is that they can’t see beyond their geek interests. All the top sites you’re always fighting about are fads compared to where the major part of the traffic on the web goes to. Google makes money because of their search engine not because of open social, not because of Google Earth or even gmail. flickr and facebook are zero in terms of traffic compared to the mail services and a site like yahoo.com.
I think Yahoo, with their focus on tight integration of services (they’re miles ahead of Google in that department, even though the component services aren’t always the best) , are one of the only companies that could legitimately threaten the big social networks. I don’t see Yahoo’s e-mail advantage going away (UNLESS, perhaps, Facebook encroaches into that domain) so I think they’ll have a critical, rare opportunity to build an audience if they can do this in the next year and roll out a high quality mobile client.
I like facebook, but am pretty sick of all these redundant communication channels (e-mail,SMS,facebook,myspace,etc.), so I like the potential for Yahoo (or anyone) to “Adium-ize” a lot of electronic communications.
Does this social network wake you up?
Ultimately, where social networking is at its best is in reference to a specific task or are of interest. Generic social networking, such as facebook, will in fact fade - giving way to specific networks (jobs:linkedin, shopping, brands, or activities: nike). This seems quite obvious to me. Pretty sure that email/ IM doesn’t really have enough to hold a network in the long run.
Love the Garlinghouse insight from 2006. Typical big company insight from a former VC.
He is wrong about email being the core of communication. The younger crowd, the crowd that makes up the majority of social network users don’t use email. Facebook/Myspace Wall and cell phone text messaging are what they use.
Cool!!
http://technoq.blogspot.com
Picking apart Brad’s language regarding what is and what is not the anchor, and whether ’social networking will be relevant’, underneath the seeming miscall, he may have had something:
Communications are the cornerstone of business, and today’s social sites are worse at it than straight IM or email. These new properties have unrealized potential in organizing how people are connected.
But, but, but, they are failing at how well they help what people do, what occupies their time, and what is important to them.
We have not yet extended the ‘graph’ (I hate these fad words) to the ‘what’.
Yahoo’s buy of Zimbra might be an indication of good thinking at long range.
“We already have your social network. It is who you are e-mailing.”
I’m not so sure that is the case! I’d call the people whom you e-mail your “Second Tier Social Network.”
Your “First Tier Social Network” are the people you say “Hi” to every day - because you see them every day, or people who you call or text, etc. Personally, I don’t e-mail these people (my own “First Tier Social Network) on a routine / frequent basis, and it is my assumption that 95% of the population doesn’t either (except, perhaps, for the extremely tech savvy).
(I especially would not consider all of the people who “spam” me as being in my social network!)
Scott,
I agree that it will take a lot more persuading to get ‘the kids’ into this model, but Yahoo’s nice, low-seam integration of chat and SMS is a heck of a start. The inclusion of some basic social network features (e.g. a ‘wall’) would go a long way with what they’ve got.
And make no mistake, young uns’ do, essentially, e-mail, they just do it in Facebook’s and Myspace’s closed messaging systems. I think they’ll eventually find some advantage in working in a more open and free (cost-wise) environment than SMS and closed networks.
I still believe over the course of 12-18 months forward, social networking will fade. No matter how many friiends people have on their networks, they will soon bored with the virtual friendships. Real life happens and as more privacy issues are breached, people will feel more and more manipulated by these sites, they will leave faster than they arrived.
just as soon as generational change occurs, the “in” thing will change to whatever is hot at that time. it just depends on the technology that is hot when that wave arrives.
case in point: we had the AOL generation, we had the Yahoo generation, we have the google generation, and now we have the myspace generation. all of which are about 3 years apart. now that myspace is roughly into it’s 3rd year, its time for the next wave. what’s next??
Scott, social networking is not the province of the young - that is only the case in the US on Facebook, where the initial deployment to students deformed the usage graph. In the rest of the world - and in countries whose Facebook usage overall is far higher (per capita) than in the US, a majority of Facebook users are over 25 and a solid 20-25% are over 35.
In this sense, focusing on leveraging older communications tools to enable the social network is reasonable. The problem is that Yahoo has much more important social networking tools in its stable already, and the extent to which they’re not part of the discussion belies Yahoo’s seriousness in this area.
Other commenters are likely right that it doesn’t necessarily matter - not everything has to be a social network, and social networks are not the be-all and end-all of online communication.
The real social network exists on your phone. Come on guys!
I wonder social network sites coming from everywhere won’t do any good.And i agree with the comment number 10 that email isn’t the best way to communicate.There are several others.
Scott and EJ,
SMS is only popular among the young because they are forced to use mobile devices (on the move all day, not at a desk) and consumer mobile devices are only now becoming good at email.
Oldsters may care more about arranging and archiving digital comms, but even sprouts want to exchange messages with groups and send/retrieve from other devices, and mobile email will be cheaper.
SMS’ only remaining advantage will be its sure tie to a specific device, which will be good for location services (and, unfortunately, spam).
Yahoo seems to have all the pieces, but hasn’t quite figured out how to put them all together.
Regarding email being just one form of communication (a. la. SMS, phone calls etc.), I guess sooner or later everyone follows up via email. Email supports a lot more “richer” content.
I quite like the fact that my social network is being built as a “consequence” of what I do (with say Google & Yahoo) as opposed to me having to explicitly “construct” it (as in MySpace, Facebook etc.). At the end of the day, social networking sites do piggy-back off your email address book to get you started.
Yahoo’s lack of vision and its failure to act proactively in the industry can cause its ultimate demise.
Yahoo! seems much more sane these days, I think they left behind the plans to become a media company and try to be a technology company after all. So my guess: Yahoo! still has talent, even if a lot of people left. If they want to, they can make a good product out of Yahoo! Mail.
E-Mail applications are predestined to be social networks, because e-mail after all is the ultimate messaging tool.
@mark
Take a look MyDealBook , let me know if it’s what you had in mind.
#4,
Google talk for mac or linux? excuse me.
Todd mentioned above that this creates a “real opportunity for a big company to support data portability and User Data Rights.” I think it’s an opportunity for a number of companies — not just BIG companies to capitalize on the idea that users want to control their own data, and control their own online information.
It seems like every other day, Tim O’Reilly is proclaiming the idea that your real social network can be found on your e-mail and your cell phone. I think he’s wrong. It’s not YOURS. It’s Microsoft’s, or the phone company’s. They own your data. They “own” your call records.
Once you own your own data, your own rights to how people should contact you — and once people aren’t playing stupid games with your data (like Facebook Beacon), then I think we’re really getting into the future of social networking. Make your data YOURS, and make it accurate and useful, not just MySpace crap or virtual drinks.
I work for Whitepages.com, and that’s one of our goals at least — to make your data owned by you, and to ensure its accuracy and portability.
Ned Hayes
WhitePages.com