The New New Social Network – Email?
Given that a study claims that there are about 1.2 billion email users and 1.8 billion active email accounts worldwide, this should not come as a surprise. Startups Xobni and Xoopit are already working on it, and as this article claims, Google and Yahoo! hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks. Email systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people, ad as this article on GigaOm says pretty much all the contact details that would help to integrate web and mobile.
Yahoo!’s proposed Inbox 2.0 for instance, has several features. First, the e-mail service is made more personal because it displays messages more prominently from people who are more important to you. Yahoo is testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her, while Yahoo Mail could also be extended to display other information about your friends as well. This can be a link to a profile page, and also what Yahoo calls “vitality” –- updated information much like the news feed on Facebook. There could also be simple features that are common on social networks, like displaying a list of friends whose birthdays are coming up, etc.
Both Google and Yahoo have pretty much all these functionalities – add in the email, chat, messaging, etc. features that also exist and it pretty much has everything you need. Couple it with the number of people who regularly visit their web-based inboxes, and they could just about turn the talk about email dying into an opportunity
Related posts:
- Yahoo! Mashes Up A New (?) Social Network
- The New New Yahoo! Mail – the fight to remain the most popular email service.
- Yahoo! To Launch Social Network SpotM In India
- Will Google’s Patent Lead To Profitable Social Networks?
- Yahoo! Opens Two More Domains For Email
Filed under: Ideas & Innovations, Trends, Website Alert
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