I've been mulling this over for a while now and thought I'd put pen to paper, as it were.
Yahoo! has an interesting opportunity to become a giant social network of micro networks. A meta social network of micro social networks? Lord, that's geeky. But I think there's something to this. Yahoo! has all the components, it just doesn't tie them together. Which is typical of Yahoo!.
The components are a huge user base, tons of vertical interest sites, great content, and a basic social network infrastructure. I hope I can explain this as well as I see the pictures in my head...
MyBlogLog is a very light weight version of this concept. It allows people to express affinity for content (blog, site, etc.) by "joining" a community for that site. The problem is that joining the community does absolutely nothing for you. I don't even know to which communities/sites I belong, nor does it matter because I don't get anything out of it. It would be better if MyBlogLog let you participate more inside the community and then pushed content to you from that community. I'm sure those geniuses are working on it.
But let's expand the idea out to Yahoo and beyond. Right now Yahoo! has a very real problem of getting people to sign in and stay signed in. There's not much reason to sign in except to get email and access My Yahoo!. I believe that 30% to 40% of Yahoo traffic is from logged in users. It may actually be less.
So what if we turned on a MyBlogLog/Yahoo! 360 hybrid system that allowed users to express affinity for content and vertical areas, find and collect friends, and share user generated content in any area of the network?
I thought of this because it's almost baseball season (thank God). I found that I wanted to "Add" myself to the Oakland A's page on Yahoo! Sports. By doing so, I would express my affinity to the Oakland A's (Go A's!) and become part of a community of users who also shared my passion for the team. I would then be able to participate in a discussion in that community. I could also be fed updates from the content of the area and the community through a content stream that would appear in a variety of places including my Yahoo account/profile, phone, email, feed reader, etc.
With me so far? (maybe/maybe not but trust me, this is something)
I think that this could work for almost any area of the site (if not the web). I'd like to join the Yahoo! Nintendo Wii "community", the recipe community, the tech community, and certain categories of news, music, shopping, autos, health, etc. etc. I would even join a search community and a Yahoo! Developer Network community. This would allow me express myself and connect to content and people in an entirely new way.
I would then have a Yahoo! profile page that promoted my affinities, interests, friends, personal content, and reputation from across the network to anyone who visited it. It would let me collect and share my flickr photos, videos I made or enjoy, Yahoo! Answers Q&A, bookmarks or whatever I choose to be public. I would also be able to pull in feeds from other personal sources as well as have a blog. People could send me messages and comment on my profile, if I choose the option.
This profile should include my calendar, links to other profiles that I have across the web, and other information that is pertinent to my online identity. The Yahoo! Profile wouldn't be Y! 360 or embedded into any other vertical... it would just be Yahoo! -- a central hub to everything I do on the network and the web for me to share as I please.
Now MyBlogLog actually does some of this. It provides a way for people to connect themselves to a web site. It also provides a rudimentary commenting system. This is the bare skeleton of the concept. But it's a long way off.
One of the troubles I've had with Yahoo! is that everything is so contained in each vertical or silo. Each product team reinvents the wheel over and over again when adding community or other social features. You see this over and over again. Answers launches social networking, Tech does blogs and lists, Autos does customization, Shopping does social lists, Local does social lists, travel does social lists, 360 is in its own corner, but very little is connected or even consistent... so on and so forth.
I don't think it would take much physical effort to plug in a social software layer across Yahoo! The pain would be to get everyone to agree and stop building their own apps. Consistency is key, then having a unifying profile page for people to bring together and share their content, activity, and affinity.
Now is the time for Yahoo! to do something this ambitious. Balls out. It would change the perception of the network and give it vitality for years to come. A half-assed attempt to make this work would be a disaster. It needs to be a central component of and a natural addition to the Yahoo! experience.
I hope I see the day this happens.
