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.

RantOn: External Services and API

/rant on

While taking a break from the work effort I thought it may be cool to write a tiny module that was pluggable for my blog and possibly other services. I’m a huge fan of iLike. I love music and listen to it all the time. However, there are never enough hours in the day to find new artists and new music. Pandora is a great tool for this too but it’s not socially generated. This is where iLike has hit the nail on the head. Where they fail however is opening their API.

I am of the opinion that if you are gathering information for social networking purposes that you should allow developers to extend that functionality. I felt like creating a fast little php template that pulled information in from their site that I had full control over. Generally not too much to ask. LibraryThing, del.icio.us, and others do it so I assumed that iLike would do the same. However, it appears that they are more geared towards having their own marketing than letting anyone create what they want. They have a flash widget that they allow you to put on your site, but what about those people that want to customize the look and functionality? This widget is very limiting.

The problem I have with this and any other service that leaves out the open API is that they are really restricting the developer community from making awesome applications utilizing their services. I tend to like to customize the look & feel and functionality of tools and sites that I create. Why cant it be the same with services like that. It’s really not complicated to make rpc/soap available to the community, so why not do it?

My plea to all of you creating new applications. Make time and some effort for services. Provide some external API that developers can plug into and use. It will not only help them, but it will help you too. Be kind to the community. Give back, give us an API.
/rant off