Sunnyvale, California — There is a good news and more good news for Yahoo fans this week: the company is cautiously preparing to jump into Twitter-like social networking offerings in a remarkable way by utilizing its massive population of e-mail subscribers as a base for sharing information on the Web, and while doing so, while it is trying very hard to avoid the privacy-related blunders made by titans Google and Facebook in recent months.
Yahoo! Updates initiated nearly two years ago to let people stream updates about their lives, thoughts or activities at its free Web services such as email and instant messaging but sharing has been limited.
A post on Yodel Anecdotal explained, “In the coming weeks, its 280 million e-mail users will be able to express their views, pictures and news articles with others in their address books. Yahoo! will expand the feature in its email service to include public updates sent from Messenger and Contacts,” according to Anne Toth and Cody Simms of Yahoo!.
“Before long, we will also allow you to start sharing your Updates with friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks,” Toth and Simms said in a blog post, calling the move a “big step forward.”
Yahoo! is advising users to thoughtfully manage privacy controls that would enable them dictate what information gets shared and with whom.
“Users can easily control who sees their Updates stream,” wrote Simms and Toth, head of privacy at Yahoo!.
“We have made sure this control is easy to find by putting it at the top of the page and that there is a single on/off check-box, with more granular controls for people who want their settings somewhere in between.”
The program would not expose a user’s contact list to the public, as was done by Google through its social networking application, Buzz feature in Gmail that automatically set up social networks based on contacts people messaged often. Facing a slew of privacy complaints, Google swiftly modified Buzz. But unless a user pro-actively opts out of the program, those Yahoo e-mail subscribers will automatically be part of a sweeping rollout of features that will incorporate the kinds of sharing done on sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
The initiative could spark disapproval from Yahoo e-mail users, who signed up for the free service perhaps never imagining the people they e-mailed would become friends for sharing vacation videos, political causes and random thoughts throughout the day. And the move comes amid growing concern by federal lawmakers and regulators over how firms such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft have handled the privacy of Internet users.
Facebook last week overhauled its privacy controls in the face of a huge bombardment of criticism that it is betraying the trust which has made it the world’s biggest social network. The social networking site refurbished its privacy settings page to provide a single control for content and “significantly reduce” the amount of information that is always visible to everyone.
Yahoo should be able to avoid controversy, then, while doing a better job of keeping up with its competitors and engaging users.