Yahoo! Recreating the Wheel Yet Again…Or Are They?

So today I saw an article titled “Building a Social Network from Within: Yahoo!“. This interested me as it is one of the things I’m involved with on a day-to-day basis. So I started reading the article and I saw this:

“Basically, “Y!Open” will allow users to have a social profile page and integrate all Yahoo! services as well as customize the page by adding applications, thus giving users an experience similar to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. It will enable users to find and interact with each other in an easier manner.”

Why Yahoo! feels this is a good idea is beyond me. They are in essence taking parts of Facebook, MySpace, and Okurt, and combining them while then calling it something fresh and new. I understand that they have many applications and users. But social networking is not just about having applications. If you look at the top used social networking sites, the thing that sets them apart is their ease of use and ease of connection. Meaning, the user experience is top notch. The reason facebook is so popular is because you connect with friends and then you have a feed of information streaming to you about all of your friends. This provides some basic instant updates about your friends so that individuals feel as though they are staying in touch with what is going on in their friends lives. Yahoo! does not feel that they are recreating the wheel. This gem comes from one of their architects.

“There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo!, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. We’re making Yahoo! more social, but we’re not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network… we just need to unlock it.”

I’m hardpressed to see how this makes any difference in whether they are recreating the wheel.

The thing that comes to my mind immediately is that they are looking for any way to keep users on their site; using it longer and exposing them to more content…and by content I of course mean advertising. What I see happening from this is that Yahoo! will gain from this move. While it’s generally really bad practice to recreate the wheel and go over everything once more, have to regenerate lists of friends and put up pictures, bio information, etc., I think that Yahoo! stands to gain a good deal of popularity from this.

The reason Yahoo! stands to gain is because they already have a very large user base. They have the branding done and using the Microsoft bid to buy Yahoo! they are leveraging the press the take the mass media for a ride. Now Yahoo! has become a front runner. Not only that, but their ad reach is second only to AOL. Plus, the promise coming from Yahoo! is that they are going to redevelop the back-end and front-end code so that it works better together. To me this sounds like a big plus for the user. The user should see some speed increases and experience changes. Hopefully, Yahoo will take a hard look at it’s UI libraries and revamp the code therein. Plus it appears that they are going to look at the little developers too, but I’ll have to see this to believe it. So far Google is the only company that really does that with Facebook and MySpace being somewhere behind them.
I guess that this is really only something that time will be able to tell but I believe that Yahoo! may be able to pull something off and it could kick Google’s attempt to the curb.

Own Your Web Identity

With the advent of web 2.0 and the wave of social networking sites, comes the notion of a “web identity”. Who are you on the net? I’m not talking about using an alias in a chat room. While aliases can be associations to a person, they are a small portion of what I’m referring to. Many of us have started to form a web identity, we have accounts on numerous social networking sites, spend time on blogs both writing and reading, we have multiple email accounts, and some of us play games.

Although we utilize all of these “tools” we have no mechanism to try everything together. There is not real tool that associates my Google Reader account with my World of Warcraft account or my Digg/del.icio.us/Stumblr/etc. accounts. Then, when I find a new site that seems to interest me, I have to create a new account adding, yet again, more separation and weakening the ties of my web identity. How do I verify that my post on Digg is the same as the one at Slashdot? What form of identification can I use to guarantee that? I can’t, yet. Enter The DataPortability Project. There is a great video up on this over at Vimeo describing the basics of what this project hopes to accomplish.
The Bene’s

The basic concept is one identity, one location for your data, and share. This means that when you join a new social networking site, you don’t have to add all of your friends and contacts again. You will have your videos, photos, mp3’s, contacts, etc. all available for you at the click of a mouse. No need to try and remember the hundreds of logins, you create one account and use _it_ to login.

This, in the future, can be used by game development companies to link game identities. This means that avatars, character names, user accounts, and those kinds of things can be used on any game. Imagine going from the XBox to World of Warcraft to whatever other games/consoles you have and being able to know that the person you knew in one game was the same person you knew in the other. It would be an awesome concept.
The Downside

Where I can envision something like this going is an identity that contains all of your personal information. That means that if you have a stock portfolio that you maintain online or banking information for automatic payments, you’d be able to manage it all from one single account. This is scary. When I think about the old adage “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” it makes me think of this. While the metaphor is referring to something slightly different, it can still be used here. You are betting that putting all of your personal information in a single location is best. Now, I’m sure it’s not going to require me to explain why this is a very plausible risk.

What about professional v.s. personal? There are some things that I’d rather not open up for the entire world to see, but definitely do not mind showing verified friends. How does that work with data portability? Are the controls that are generally built into something like Plaxo built into the data portability platform?
My Opinion

I think this is the next big thing in the web. To be honest, I think that there are some far more intelligent people working on this project and plan than myself and that my downsides have probably already been thought through. I also suspect that they have looked into the crystal ball and seen some of the potential uses of this technology. I think that so long as the correct security is in place, having one place for your data is the way to go. While I don’t see this really being a standard for a few years, I believe that once it does we will really see some significant changes in the way that people develop applications, both desktop and web based.
More Information

• The DataPortability Project
• Action Packs / White Papers
• Wikipedia: Data Portability