Yahoo Email and the Social Graph

One of the big stories this year will be how the "social graph" becomes liberated from destination sites such as Facebook.

I am current a "member" of at least 5 to 10 online networks of significance to me, from LinkedIn, to Facebook, to my local cycling club, not to mention my Skype list, my email contacts and my IM contacts.

Many of my contacts exist in all of these lists, some in one but not another. My "social graph" is actually still quite fragmented.

It would make sense therefore to liberate my networks from these applications and sites and allow them to be used across ANY online community that I want to be a part of. I would just need to be able to tag the status of a contact as being a friend, a professional contact, a family member or anything else I want. Then I could drag a tagged list to any application on any device. That's where we need to get to.

In order to do so, someone, somewhere is going to figure out
1. How to extract the social graph from the applications
2. Make money from doing so

Google's strategy in this area is with it's "Open Social" project. Facebook has Facebook, Microsoft has MySpace.

Yahoo are hot on their heels.

Yesterday at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Jerry Yang from Yahoo presented Yahoo's ambition to become the start point of choice for consumers by adding social networking power to Yahoo mail (currently the world's largest email supplier with over 250m users).

Yang said. “At Yahoo we want to be most essential starting point for your life,” and “take the complexity of the Web and simplify your life through very powerful technologies.”

The new Yahoo user experience will centre on Yahoo Mail and will integrate email, social context, tagging and a whole host of "Web 2.0" features.

The "Friends" in the Facebook world are just your "Contacts" from your email address lists. Based on the frequency of your contacts, email can be ordered in terms of social importance rather than say date.

3rd party apps can be accessed in the same interface giving the opportunity for friends to collaborate

Yang an example of planning a dinner. You would drag the thread into a map and it will bring up the profiles of those on the mail, note preferences (for food in this case) and suggest restaurants in the area. You can also take an email message, pop up the profiles of those on the message, takes an address from email and show it a map.

That's great. A collaborative decision making tool for a group of people to book a restaurant.

However, wouldn't it be even better if the social graph required to do this were not hard-wired into Yahoo. Or into Facebook for that matter?

Surely the application "restaurant booker" should be platform neutral and could exist on the web, on a desktop, on a mobile or a TV, and that the social graph that powers the "connections" would be transcendent and available for any developer to use.

Maybe, if Yahoo opened up their social graph to as an API for developers to use (and maybe charge a tiny fee to make it worth their while), we might have what we need.



News source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=7503, by Dan Farber & Larry Dignan