Yahoo & Social Media : Tagging, Blogs, Reviews
There’s a nice article worth reading in Business Week today which is comparable to Business 2.0’s Flickrization of Yahoo; Yahoo’s Social Circle. The article reviews some of Yahoo’s recent acquisitions (including WebJay, blo.gs, Flickr, Upcoming.org and del.icio.us) and current Yahoo Social Media offerings such as MyWeb as Yahoo turns “search from a passive activity to an interactive one.”
The article goes on to describe how Google and other Yahoo competitors are also getting into the Social space, with Google’s Orkut offering and Personalized Search, but have “done far less than Yahoo in the arena of online community building.”
Yahoo didn’t invent social search. The idea of tapping the collective wisdom of communities has floated around academia for years. Startup Eurekster hit the market first with its social search technology in early 2004. Since then, several other upstarts have jumped in with different twists on the general concept, including Jeteye Technologies and Kaboodle.
But Yahoo represents its greatest opportunity for traction, due to its hefty $4 billion war chest and 200 million active registered users. If Yahoo can begin to entice its legions of visitors to try some of its community offerings, be it sharing photos on Flickr or listing favorite blogs via blo.gs, it can begin to apply social search on a wider scale.
After your finished with this article I also suggest revisiting The Flickrization of Yahoo from Business 2.0. The article is a bit dated now, but really assists with the visualization of Yahoo’s future and gamble on Social Search, while also mobilizing their active registered users, all 200 million of them.
