While everyone else is talking about Yang taking over(good idea) and the possibility of acquiring MySpace for 25% of Yahoo!(bad idea), I thought I’d point out five other things Yahoo! is up to, some big, some small, that have been flying under the radar. Without further ado…
1. Yahoo! is integrating with Facebook. Unlike various fan-made Flickr applications, Yahoo! has announced an official Facebook app for its Upcoming.org events service. It’s competing with both Attendio and Going.com’s services/Facebook Apps. If traffic numbers for the services themselves are a determining factor, Upcoming.org will be the eventual winner. Though the appeal of Facebook apps isn’t just in giving users another place to access your service(though that’s important) but also in getting friends of your users to start using your service. It’s good for Yahoo that Attendio only has 3,185 Facebook users it’s not likely to convert, rather than 30,000 or 300,000.
2. GMail isn’t the only e-mail with IM integration anymore. First announcing it’s plans to do so late last year, Yahoo! has embedded its IM client into Yahoo! Mail, putting contacts, the inbox, and IM windows all within a tabbed AJAX interface. Y!M has allowed users to add Windows Live Messenger(Microsoft’s IM client) contacts since mid-2006, which now means that Yahoo! Mail users can chat with users of Microsoft software from e-mail before users of Windows Live Mail can.
Because Y!M offers custom status messages, as does Google Talk, the concept of ‘online presence’ continues to gain power in our communications software. This power will be enhanced when e-mail and other communication tools better understand the context of our contacts, as I mentioned in my Innovation in E-mail article. Once contacts are given context, users can display different presence messages for different contacts depending on the situation. If I’m a newspaper reporter at work, I can let coworkers and sources know I’m available, but friends and family know that I’m busy.
While Google has always appealed to the tech crowd on both the frontend and the backend, Yahoo! has a very mainstream frontend appeal. If it can regain some of its lost developer appeal, it will be able to continue to innovate in ways pleasing to the mainstream; communication tools are one of the key areas where Yahoo! could out-do Google if it can continue to integrate services while simplifying the process of using them. Yahoo! has long been a portal, it’s good at being a portal. It’s admitted it won’t be able to compete with Google as a search portal. But it could, and it should compete with Google as a communications portal.
3. The June 26th online radio blackout is supported by Yahoo! In protest of planned royalty rate increases(increases large enough to put many smaller webcasters out of business), online radio broadcasters are replacing their music streams with silence, static, or PSAs about the planned increases, in order to draw attention to the issue. Yahoo!‘s LAUNCHcast service would be as affected by these increases as much as any other web broadcaster. Pandora, which powers MSN Radio, is another prominent participant. I was surprised not to see XM Radio Online, which powers AOL Radio, listed as a participant.
4. Yahoo! is competing with local newspapers. You probably have heard about Yahoo’s acquisition of sports-site Rivals.com. But as ZDNet’s Larry Dignan points out, “The fact that Rivals.com has a “locally-driven open publishing network” gets a passing mention. But if My Yahoo could put local high school and my alma mater’s latest results I’m much more likely to go there. Show me the top high school football recruits in my county and it’s a bigger win”. This could be pretty important for Yahoo! since according to Alexa stats(with all the disclaimers that entails), Yahoo! News is slowly losing market share.
5. Overseas, Yahoo! dominates mobile web search. As Yahoo! upgrades its mobile phone software suite, six Asian cell phone companies have agreed to make Yahoo! the exclusive search engine for their mobile services. Yahoo! is also providing localized beta versions of its software to 13 other countries. This puts Yahoo! in a much stronger position when the mobile web finally takes off… whenever that may be(The Guardian Unlimited tells us: when wireless data fees finally become reasonable and transparent).