Yahoo! is expanding its social networking features available to its 280m email users- but the online media giant is keen to avoid the mistakes made by rival Google’s Buzz earlier this year. The move marks the company’s largest social networking push to date by significantly ramping up social features on Yahoo! Mail with its social media service Yahoo! Updates.
The company plans to let users share comments, pictures and news articles with those in their address books, as well as see updates from contacts on third-party sites such as Facebook. Yahoo! Updates launched 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.
03/06/2010
Until now, sharing has been limited. However, in the coming weeks, Yahoo! will expand its Yahoo! Updates tool into its email service to include public updates sent from Messenger and Contacts.
The service will initially incorporate data from 15 partner sites, including Facebook and MySpace, but will eventually expand to include other services such as Twitter.
Yahoo! says it will not allow users to see who their contacts are following, a feature of Google’s similar Buzz project which caused uproar when it was introduced earlier this year.
The firm says it will offer a one-click opt-out button on the side of Yahoo! email and will let users decide how they share each piece of information.
However, all updates on Yahoo! Mail will by default be public to a user’s contact list. Yahoo! also says it is planning to give users a one-week warning about the changes on June 7.
In the company blog, Anne Toth and Cody Simms of Yahoo! said: “Before long, we’ll also allow you to start sharing your Updates with friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.”
Yahoo’s rival Google faced a torrent of criticism in February after it launched a 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.
Keen to avoid the same backlash, Yahoo! is urging users to thoughtfully manage privacy controls that let them dictate what information gets shared and with whom.
“You can easily limit who sees your Updates stream,” wrote Simms and Toth, head of privacy at Yahoo!.
“We’ve 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 new features are part of Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz’s efforts to reposition Yahoo! as a way to tie together different web content and services.
Both Yahoo!’s recent USD100m acquisition of content network Associated Content and its deal with Zynga to bring the firm’s social games to Yahoo! are part of these efforts.
Read the company blog here:
http://ycorpblog.com/2010/05/31/yahoo-privacy/