Uno de Waal

Uno de Waal’s online space covering everything about web2.0, social networks and internet related developments in South Africa and how it fits in with the rest of the world.

Yahoo Mash: Steps toward consolidating Yahoo web Properties?

Uno as Web2.0

Sep|17|2007

I got an invite to Yahoo Mash this morning (thanks InviteShare).

Apart from the other great features around it (read the Webware review) like the Wiki style editing, I saw an interesting little addition:

Yahoo Mosh

And more interestingly: The option to update All my Yahoo! Profiles.

Now this is a big thing. Yahoo has a lot of web properties - ReadWriteWeb lists the top ten:

  1. News
  2. Answers
  3. Flickr
  4. Pipes
  5. Mail
  6. Messenger
  7. Music
  8. Delicious
  9. Mobile
  10. MyYahoo

Currently very few of the profiles speak to each other - all the data is silo’d in each property. While you can use your Yahoo ID to sign in to Flickr, you can’t do the same for Delicious. Yahoo has come far with their Single Sign On service but they are still struggling to bring everything in to one ID. The option above didn’t do what I expected it to do - it didn’t change anything in Flickr, Yahoo or Delicious. But it does give away a potentially cool idea.

Could Yahoo Mash be the start of a single identity server? I’d like to see a space that works really well with Flickr and Delicious. I’ve been talking about Identity for a while here, some people say OpenID is the way to go, others are a bit skeptical about it. But if Yahoo adopts some sort of identity server there is quite a large possibility that they could become a single identity server.

MyYahoo seems a bit sparse at the moment - maybe we’ll see Mash become the new MyYahoo?



3 Responses

  1. Norman Rasmussen

    17|Sep|2007

    idproxy.net lets you use your Yahoo! account to sign in to sites that support the OpenID standard. So it’s a kind of half-way step until Yahoo! supports OpenID in-house.

  2. Steve Hayes

    17|Sep|2007

    Yet another thing for Yahoo to lose in cyberspace?

    Last year they lost my Geocities hosted web pages. They reappeared 2 months later, after I had moved them to another host. They lost my e-mail for 6 months, but the archived mail is still goner, as are the Yashoo360 pages. I certainly wouldn’t sign up for any new services with them, at least not until they’ve found the old ones that they’ve lost.

  3. Tyler

    18|Sep|2007

    I am not even bothering to sign-up to another social network for a long time, I am pretty content with Facebook at the moment. :)


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