Yahoo: Inventing the Next Facebook
March 5, 2009
Reuters issued a story with the social network worm dangling in front of the Web surfers fishing for information. You can read “Yahoo CEO Interested in Social Networks and Search” here. The Thomson Reuters’ links can be slippery eels themselves, so the link may be dead when you read my comments. The story summarized Yahoo’s new chief executive’s comments at a bank’s high tech conference. Yep, banks. High tech. Credibility. Whatever. For me, the most remarkable comment attributed to Ms. Bartz, chief Yahoo, was:
“I do not believe we can invent the next Facebook,” Bartz said.
When I read this, I realized that Yahoo’s research and development effort might be redirected. Acquistions, partnerships, and deals may not require the innovations that have been released in the last year; for example, BOSS, the build your own search system. Maybe Yahoo will stick to its historical path of buying companies and trying to grow seedlings into giant redwoods. I liked Ms. Bartz’s pragmatism. I wonder what it means for Yahoo’s R&D initiatives and what companies will become the focal point for Yahoo. With “every business up for examination”, the stability of Yahoo may be a future goal, not a here and now reality.
Stephen Arnold, March 5, 2009
Comments
One Response to “Yahoo: Inventing the Next Facebook”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
I believe if you found a different way to draw people to a social network, you can become more popular than facebook. My website, JoinMyChain.com is a social interaction competition with an overall goal of linking the world together with the use of photos. Individuallity is what I am looking to represent. In order to do so, each photo will only contain two people. The next photo in the chain will contain one of those people and another one, thus creating a link between each subsequent photo. The site is also designed to make it very difficult to create fake accounts. To link with somebody, you must take a photo with someone else, send them a link request (photo attached) and have them accept it. This process must be done twice in order for you to be linked-in to a chain. The competitiveness is seeing what chain is the first and quickest to certain numerical marks like 100, 500, and 1,000. These records will be kept and those who set them will be given recognition for doing so. Most other social networks, if you take away profiles, blogs,and user to user messaging system, do not exist. Whereas JoinMyChain was created to see how many people around the world can be linked together by using photos, which means that creating chains using photos is the main concept, and having those other capabilities is secondary. I have many more ideas for this site, but we are still in beta at the moment. If you have any questions or comments, please email me, the founder of JoinMyChain, at multi-b@joinmychain.com
Thanks,
Multi-B