In the spirit of examining the economics of social network services, as I did yesterday with Meebo, today I'm looking at YooNo, another social product that we've reviewed favorably but that appeared to be in desperate need of a business model. YooNo is a social network aggregator: You install it in your browser and it helps you keep track of your friends and what they like.
And here's the revenue model: Today, in addition to announcing feature improvements such as a new IE version and support for MySpace and iMeem networks, YooNo is also announcing the addition of a product recommendation pane. If you're on a site--any site--that mentions a product, author, or artist, YouNo will scan product data from partners Amazon, eBay, Buy.com, Walmart, iTunes, and other stores and display relevant product info. If you buy a product by following one of those links, YooNo gets an affiliate fee.
The service can also be used on the product pages of commerce sites to show other stores that have the same product you're looking for, but possibly at a better price.
The YooNo sidebar locates products from a variety of stores based on what's showing in the main browser window.
When the shopping widget launches on November 24, it will display products based solely on the page you're on and what the partner sites are selling. Future versions will take your friends' activities into account.
As YooNo VP Regan Fletcher told me, "It's really difficult to monetize social aggregation itself. We are monetizing our discovery technology. YooNo bundles social aggregation and discovery together, and we're able to monetize one."
Affiliate fees are substantial, compared to advertising rates, so the model makes sense in theory. Where it may fall down for YooNo in practice is scale. The service is based on a browser plug-in, and that's just a gigantic roadblock to achieving scale in the social media market. With a plug-in as the distribution model, a good product should be able to grab a devoted core base of users, but you don't get to scale quickly these days--or at all--if you require people to install code.
YooNo is a useful browsing utility that combines several social features. On any Web site, it shows you: other sites that were liked by people who bookmarked that site; blog posts and articles related to the page; and info on the site's primary users (called "Yoosers").
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
It could be an overwhelming amount of information, but it's actually pretty helpful. The Links (related sites) function is both the oldest YooNo feature and its most useful. Based on YooNo's shared-bookmarks function, it helps you find sites related to the one you're viewing. It's a collaborative filter, in other words, but you don't have to know that to use the site. And you don't have to collaborate, either--YooNo returns results even if you keep your own bookmarks private.
Coming soon (within a few days) is a new feature that will show stories and posts related to the page you're on. This is based on searching and link analysis, not analysis of bookmarks, and is reminiscent of Sphere. It could become a good site for picking up the newest news on pages that interest you, although in my tests (using a beta) it didn't reliably return good info.
Finally, the "Yoosers" section will soon show you the people who bookmarked the site you're on, and let you can drill into a user's public bookmarks to explore a topic in more depth. You'll be able to pull up a very fun, floating-bubble view of the network of users around the one you're looking at, based on shared bookmarks. Frankly I find it incomprehensible, but it sure is fancy. MyBlogLog does a better job of creating ad-hoc networks around Web surfing behavior.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
The service also lets you synchronize your bookmarks across multiple computers, a handy feature.
YooNo works as a plug-in sidebar for Firefox (IE is coming) and is a worthwhile download based on the related-site feature alone. The related-articles feature could also be very useful. I don't know what to make of the Yoosers function.
See also StumbleUpon, Wink, Diigo, Del.icio.us, and Shadows, among others.
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