Yahoo’s oneConnect: One Mobile App to Rule Them All
Erick Schonfeld
40 comments »
Today at the Mobile World Congress in Spain, Yahoo announced a mobile app called oneConnect that will be available in the second quarter as part of the upcoming release of Yahoo Go 3.0. I have not seen a demo of this myself, but it sounds like a much-needed integration of messaging and social apps. OneConnect will pull together contacts from your mobile phone, Yahoo address book, and social networks, including:
Bebo
Dopplr
Facebook
Flickr
Friendster
Hi5
Last.fm
LinkedIn
Myspace
Twitter
You will be able to see whether your contacts are online, recent messages, status updates, uploaded photos, and other activity streams for each one. Of course, you will also be able to send them messages via e-mail, IM, and SMS. The mobile app will save SMS and IM conversations as a single thread, even if you are texting and the other person is using Yahoo Messenger. The app also supports AIM, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk.
A feature called “Pulse” will give you the most recent updates of all your contacts across all the social networks it monitors. You’d see, for instance, that your girlfriend just added a photo to Flickr, your business partner just updated his Facebook page to say he landed in London, and your brother just sent out a Twitter. It is like Friendfeed or Spokeo on your mobile phone, tied to your address book so that you can message your friends based on what they are doing.
Yahoo didn’t invent anything here, but simply integrating all of these services is powerful stuff. If you think about it, oneConnect is a mobile portal for the social Web. It connects you to your friends online and then gets out of the way.
One app that can pull together all your friends’ activities from social sites across the Web and present it in a consistent way should strengthen Yahoo’s position on mobile phones. Except on a few advanced handsets like the iPhone, the browser is not yet the ideal user interface for interacting with the Web on your mobile phone. A dedicated mobile app like oneConnect, which itself will be part of Yahoo Go, makes much more sense. But there are only so many apps you can launch on your phone before feeling overwhelmed. This fits in nicely with Yang’s “starting point” strategy. There can only be a few starting points on the mobile Web, and Yahoo is well on its way to being one of them.
Ah… it had to happen
What is key now is that Yahoo takes the next brave step and works hand-in-glove with DataPortability.org to allow users the real choice - to choose with whom they will trust their social graph… of course one might ask how far they can go with this model - i.e. how do they allow users to manage trust of the artefacts of their social graph between each other - this is still something missing that needs attention.
As a terrible teaser I can’t resist hinting that this year a team I’m working with are going to make an announcement relating to my comment that Yahoo will hopefully embrace, fingers crossed!
Meanwhile good luck Yahoo, lets hope you can continue and reclaim a pioneering role on the net that returns exponential value to those shareholders that are wonderin’ why you would turn down a deal with Microsoft.
It’s all about trust and that’s one of the things I felt would be eroded by getting into bed with a 20th century business model
Wow! That’s just like our app. Good thing we’re launching in Q1!
As idea and design .. two thumbs up.
This kind of apps have a good target. And also people tend to use less services. So I think that it could be a hit in the near future… but with great marketing support.
Yahoo is launching new products at an insane rate. It will be interesting to see what it does to their value in the whole microsoft madness. Yahoo’s oneConnect: One Mobile App to Rule Them All
they also laid off quite a lot of people today
It’s nice to see that there are these different movements dealing with the large amounts of social content and services.
First of all it seems like all the big social sites are trying to do it all. (LinkedIn getting less business related and facebook getting more business related)
Second there are the aggregators, like mentioned above and Netvibes, Plaxo Pulse and others.
Third there are distributors sending your content to all platforms from a single entry point. Like http://www.mobypicture.com.
Is there room for all?
Finally.
I cannot wait to use this product. Unified presence and communication will streamline the way we interact and manage information around us.
I have been on a similar path with my work at Ribbit. I just posted a teaser screenshot of this on my blog.
Great job Yahoo. Just don’t forget about the missing piece…Google
Good Move by Yahoo. All this does is make M$ and Balmer more aware that they need to up their offer for Yahoo. I think M$ will come at them with a new price of $34-35. They just have to accept their fate and negotiate a deal.
Their apps always look really good.
One Search is nice….works a bit wonky though. This will be interesting.
Why do they not release that as an “non mobile”, internet app ?
There is an application similar to Yahoo Connect called Fring (www.fring.com) which allows you to communicate with your contacts on Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Twitter, Google Talk, Skype and you can also setup VOIP all on your mobile. The application uses your mobile’s wifi or GPRS or 3G connection. Its a great application for people on the move. Best of all its Free!
@mel - Agreed. Mobile integration is a critical component, but total mobile integration drives one batty after a while.
Holy crap Yahoo headlines! Is there so much attention on them cuz they’re about to get gobbled up??
This is Social Network Aggregation for Mobiles. Good early start from Yahoo! and its possibly going to be a killer feature for Yahoo! Go.
This is good. I love the Yahoo Go 2.0. Will look forward to trying it out.
I tried to install Yahoo Go 2.0 for my Treo (3.0 does not yet support the Treo)
and I couldn’t for the life of me find where to do it. Google yields lots of links saying “Download Go 2.0″ but they all land on the /go page, which is only 3.0.
Anyone tried to do this since 3.0 came out?
there’s now 12 TC sponsors on the right? ughh
too many, it looks overtly spammy.
i don’t even look there no more - info overload.
the magic number, i feel, is 6.
6 isn’t too crowded…and it’s easy on the eyes.
with 6, i actually took the time to read/learn about the logos/companies.
It’s amazing a company can launch a set of screenshots and a description and call it a “product”.
Yahoo has had some good “ideas” lately — especially from the Connected Life group — but their problem has always been execution. Remember Panama??
@troll 17. Who gives a shit, grow up and stfu. Loser.
PULSE?
did plaxo not trademark that ? sucks for them
We launched this product last May as Fidg’t. We believe that the unified social address book on mobile devices is the new browser. Let the games begin. =)
This is great - and they didnt need to invent a mobile operating system to do it.
@18 is spot on here… Yahoo isn’t being innovative as they have copied numerous services that are already live with a unified communications service.
OneConnect isn’t innovative, and it isn’t a product yet. This isn’t to say it won’t have value, it will. Let’s not give Yahoo! too much credit here for copying existing services.
Good luck to Yahoo! with oneConnect.
With this, Yahoo! is heading in the right direction, definitely. This is a good one. Coincidentally this’s what we’ve been developing also, for webtop and desktop remix, as the user’s personal digital library.
It will be interesting to see the effect, 18 months out, that oneConnect and similar product/services have on the various sources being aggregated. Sure, there is a big difference today between LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, and Flickr, but those differences will start to dilute in an aggregated environment. Sustainability and valuation are bolstered by posters and retrievers frequenting the same domain. It’s been about eyeballs congregating. Once the posted content is aggregated, the retriever can fish info from afar. Eyeballs become disjointed. What happens then?
yahoo, quickly port to the iphone…yahoo, quickly port to the iphone…yahoo, quickly port to the iphone…yahoo, quickly port to the iphone…
maybe that’ll get thru.
Doesn’t this remind anybody of Jaiku?! (now part of Google)
oneConnect looks like a merger of the Jaiku mobile app and its web service.
The Jaiku mobile app had the contacts feature.
The Jaiku web service allowed you to add feeds from Flickr etc on to your stream.
Now that Jaiku is under the Google umbrella, can we safely assume that Google is cooking something similar?
we would be seeing a simillar app in google mobile software
Maybe I am just overlooking something, but how can this app get the facebook data without running a script? I thought this kind of data wasn’t coming out of FB via the API…
Somebody help me out here please!
the guys at zyb.com already have this partially on the web via a sync tool and 10 meters away from yahoo’s 100 m2 stand in barcelona they are launching the Social Phonebook from their 10 m2 stand. seems to be very similar to yahoo oneConnect - looks like yahoo checked zyb, plaxo, and jaiku out and got heavily inspired
The concept is pitch-perfect for the moment — get your social data anywhere you are — social is mobile now, that’s clear.
I just have my doubts that Yahoo really groks how to continuously engage the mash-up world, where every new app changes the landscape, and every new kind of social activity is an instant addition to the feed.
oneConnect has the same kind of potential that Yahoo Pipes did — to be your one-stop shop for weaving together every thread of social interactivity into one great canvas.
But we all know that Yahoo sadly let Pipes linger without a real set of support vehicles, giving an opening to other mash-up engines like Popfly, etc., etc. I think that Pipes could have been more — might even be more in the future — but Yahoo hasn’t shown they can execute with a real mash-up platform play.
At WhitePages, we’ll be excited if they CAN get it right, because that would open up a whole bunch of new possibilities for our users and for contact information in general. C’mon, Yahoo — get it right!!!
Isn’t it just like 8hands?
This app much better than yahoo and was done long before