Yahoo Mail, iGoogle to take on Facebook?

The New York Times is reporting that iGoogle and Yahoo Mail could be at the core of social-networking plans for the two search companies.

"Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph--the connections between people," Saul Hansell writes in his blog posting. "Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts."

Hansell says he's heard from several Google executives that that's their plan. "We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social," says Joe Kraus, who heads up Google's OpenSocial project.

Meanwhile over at Yahoo, Brad Garlinghouse, head of communication and community products, said Yahoo is working on "Inbox 2.0," which displays messages from close friends more prominently than from strangers. Yahoo Mail also will be expanded to display more information about friends, such as birthdays.

If this is so, why are the companies experimenting with social-networking services like Mash, Kickstart and Orkut?

[Jesse Chan]

Google's Social Graph

This is part of Google's social graph to unify all their major services. Brilliant, really. http://fishtrain.com/2007/08/25/what-is-a-social-graph/

[flickrz]

yahoo mail? may be..igoogle unlikely

The real question is whether google has that kind of personalizable information? when it comes to gmail and igoogle; google has more mindshare than marketshare. gmail is still trailing MSN, AOL, YAHOO etc by a large margin in the US (15-20 million user vs 50, 60, 80 for MSN, AOL, YAHOO respectively). Compare that to Facebook; with its 40 M users is in commanding position right now. I don't see how google is going to be able to create a real threat for Facebook. Now, I am not a big facebook fan so hate to say that gmail users spend the least amount of time on gmail than facebook users spend on facebook, yahoomail, hotmail or aol mail. But, when you compare no.of people that spend time on yahoomail (80 mil. in US) and for the amount of time they spend time on it (almost equal to facebook or little less); it seems that they are in a competitive position. But, given yahoo's inability to execute on big plans it is difficult to imagine they crashing facebook.
Also, google's strength in search is not going to help all that much.
(note: all these numbers are from comscore and of US)

[devahaz]

the power is not in recreating facebook

Much deeper information exists within email interactions than most facebook communications. Rather than trying to recreate Facebook type functionality, the opportunity within email lies in using this deep information to provide much more powerful and relevant interactions between people than currently takes place at social networking sites. More on this here: http://www.emaildashboard.com/2007/11/inbox-20---emai.html