E-mail as Social Network: the Pitfalls - Inbox 2.0
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The New York Times covered the separate plans of the two search engines recently. Not many details were forthcoming from Google. I've discussed elsewhere, however, how Google's OpenSocial is just the first step in a wider strategy dubbed "maka maka." That wider strategy involves adding social networking functionality to all of Google's web services. Joe Kraus, who runs the OpenSocial project, thinks it makes more sense than building a whole new platform: "It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand," he noted.
Yahoo came up with the term Inbox 2.0 for their plan. While the company wasn't heavy on details or dates, it did reveal some of its ideas. It's working on a way to display e-mail messages from people who are more important to the receiver more prominently. Figuring that out could be tricky; Yahoo hopes to automate the process by looking at how frequently the sender and receiver exchange e-mail messages and instant messages.
That's something even current social networks can't do, and it's just a first step. The next step involves adding other information about your friends, such as a link to a profile page and a "news feed" that tells you what your friends have been up to. "The exciting part is that a lot of this information already exists on our network, but it's dormant," said Brad Garlinghouse, head of communication and community projects for Yahoo.
Garlinghouse envisions a two-page profile system. One page would be the profile that users show to others, and would include a lot of their own online activity. "The profile page is where you can expose what you want people to know about you," he said, though he doesn't think it would be a profile page in the same sense as, say, you can achieve with Yahoo 360 or other sites where users put up a personal profile in answer to a list of questions about their interests.
The second page would be a personal page that only the user sees. On that page would be information from their friends as well as RSS feeds or anything else they want at their fingertips: weather, headlines, movie times, what have you. With the proper widgets, this second page could even let users run saved searches on other sites from the same place: find any auctions for specific types of items on eBay, for example, or get an alert when the latest "Ask a Ninja" or "Chad Vader" video is up on YouTube.
Again, it's worth emphasizing that Yahoo doesn't seem to be planning to implement this as a separate platform. "This isn't a separate product," Garlinghouse explained. "This is an integration that has to be seamless to the user."
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