Yahoo! Turning! Itself! Into! Social! Network!
...but at least it is honest about it, unlike Google.
This new initiative by Yahoo!, the Yahoo! Open Strategy is much like Google's App Engine}. Except they are being honest about it, unlike Google.
Instead of saying that you now have cloud computing and you can run on our hardware, Yahoo! just blatently said "make apps for our latent social network". I think that's really what Google should have said at the launch of App Engine because as far as I can tell, that's all it is.
So looking at it on the social network level, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Google and now Yahoo! are all competing to be the largest social network. Amazing how everyone is base-lining at that (all due to Facebook's immense success).
I'm not a big fan about much of this though since it still doesn't help promote what I want.
Instead of competing social networks, I want collaborating social networks. As I've said before "data wants to be free" and in any of the sites mentioned above that is not the case. In fact, it just locks users in more to that platform. Also, it means you have to choose which site to write apps for, unless they already allow Open Social apps (Orkut does, but Orkut isn't that big a player).
Fair play to Yahoo! though since I think that this will be a great step for them. Still, I wonder what their next strategy is. First it was a web directory, then a search engine, then a web portal and now a social network. They seem to transform into whatever the current flavour of the month is. What's next? Anything but a Microsoft subsidiary!
P.S. And no, I'm not a Google basher, I just like commenting on where I see they're doing it wrong. You can't be mad at a company that is putting $6.5 million into open source this year. And no, I'm not a Yahoo! lover either, I left them a long time ago due to all the adverts in their terribly implemented Yahoo! Mail. Just so you know I play fair, GMail is awesome and Flickr is the best there is (except they now allow horrible videos - what a complete waste)!
This post originated on http://chilts.org/.
Email me on andychilton -at- gmail -dot- com.