Last month, Yahoo Mash was shut down before ever leaving beta form. They have not completely abandoned social media. And now, Yahoo has renewed its attempt to making its site more social, with the rolling out a beta of its recently updated “universal profile” system, Thursday.
The feature will enable Yahoo to better track and target ads to its users. Today, they have begun a new phase in socializing, which looks to turn Yahoo as a whole into a more social entity. The social team is being headed by Jim Stoneham, who only joined the Yahoo team six weeks ago according to TechCrunch.
Yahoo has repeatedly lagged behind the other “big four” search engines in the social networking space. Google owns Orkut and controls ads on MySpace, Microsoft has its own Windows Live Spaces and a minor stake in Facebook, and AOL owns Bebo.
While Yahoo attempted to establish its own social network in 2005 with 360, and at about the same time last year the company announced it was abandoning the project in favor of an open “Inbox 2.0” concept. Yahoo 360 users will reportedly be migrated over to this new profile system as well.
“There is not a lot to demo in this release. It is a foundation release that will allow other things to happen and developers to do things,” Stoneham said in a statement. “We have to make sure it works before turning on connections to big traffic properties. The big bang theory does not work at this scale. Its’ like Apple rolling out a new operating system release.” In September, Yahoo gave developer’s access to its new social APIs and Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) for writing applications that run on Yahoo Web pages.
The new profile page will allow users to make limited changes to their profiles, such as status updates, adding connections (friends in the social graph) from their Yahoo address book, and listing interests. Users can change settings, control permissions and manage notifications across various Yahoo properties.
Stoneham discusses Yahoo’s new objective on the Yodel Anecdotal blog:
I want to make it clear that this new profile is not intended to be a new social destination on Yahoo!. Rather, our plan is to integrate “social” as a central dimension into the services you use every day. For example, if you are on Yahoo! Messenger 9.0, you are already seeing Yahoo! Buzz, Mybloglog, and Twitter updates as part of your friends’ status messages. Soon you will see social capabilities added elsewhere across Yahoo!, beginning with places where you start your day. The new homepage we are testing will soon have an application that lets you stay up to date with what your friends are doing across the Web. And Yahoo! Mail will be delivering a smarter inbox, displaying emails from your most important connections first.
To set up a profile, Yahoo users simply sign onto profiles.yahoo.com with their Yahoo ID. Since it is still in beta, the profile system is not yet integrated with Yahoo’s other services. In setting up a profile, however, it does automatically offer the user’s Yahoo mail contact list to invite others.
User profiles provide crucial information that allows for highly personalized advertising, likewise, so do searches. By pairing the two, Yahoo will be able to deliver the kind of target-able advertisements that are earning companies like Google more than previously expected.
Stoneham expects Yahoo’s social graph to “light up quickly” soon, however.
Additionally, within the next few months Yahoo will be adding a new universal header on every page of the service to unify key navigation elements. Along with the usual links to the Yahoo home page, MyYahoo and Yahoo Mail, a new profile link will provide access to user profiles and contacts.
During an interview in September, Venkat Panchapakesan, head of Yahoo’s Audience Technology Group, listed the three top challenges Yahoo faces in bringing its social dimension to scale: making applications such as Yahoo Mail work well on desktop and mobile devices; data privacy; and converting all profiles to a single name space (the universal profile) and lighting up the social graph. One challenge partially down, and two to go!
Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt recently said, “As marketing budgets are squeezed, targeted measurable ads are becoming more valuable to advertisers, and as consumer budgets are squeezed, people use the web for comparison shopping to hunt for bargains online and in stores.”
Yahoo’s profiles can be populated with user data on: work, schools, personal interests, and relationship status, as well as the basics: age, sex, and location. Like all social networks, Yahoo users can establish connections with others, write comments, and share a news feed of their activity on Yahoo services like Flickr and Yahoo! Music.
This seems to be an intelligent move on Yahoo’s part. There is no question that the web as a whole is turning more social by the day, and this is a good way to keep users interested in using their services.
Users can get started updating their Yahoo profiles by logging onto profiles.yahoo.com.