By Eric Auchard
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -
Yahoo Inc is working to rewire
the dozens of services across its site so that users can manage
all information about themselves in a single place and share it
with friends across the Web.
"We are not building another social network," Chief
Technology Officer Ari Balogh told more than 1,000 attendees at
the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco on Thursday. "We
are building social into everything we do."
The effort is part of a larger plan to make it easier for
users to share information about themselves with other Yahoo
users and on websites that run applications using Yahoo
features, seeking to help the world's biggest Internet media
company keep pace with social networks like Facebook and
MySpace.
Yahoo is spelling out this evolving strategy in the face of
Microsoft Corp's looming, $44 billion unsolicited takeover
offer.
Microsoft has set a deadline of Saturday for Yahoo to agree
to a deal on those terms or face a hostile takeover campaign.
The software giant said on Thursday it will announce whether it
plans to proceed with a deal or pull out next week.
Unified user profiles and the effort to make it easier for
users to share information with their friends is part of the
company's broader "Yahoo Open Strategy" due out later this
year, Balogh said. The plan would give users simple privacy
controls to decide what data they reveal about themselves.
"We are going to unify all profiles throughout Yahoo," said
Balogh, whose appointment as Yahoo's CTO was announced on
January 29, a day before Microsoft first proposed its $31 per
share cash and stock offer to merge with Yahoo.
SOCIAL DIMENSION
Balogh estimated there are more than 10 billion latent
social connections that exist between Yahoo's 500 million
monthly users in the form of e-mail addresses, instant message
buddy lists, address books and other shared connections.
Yahoo aims to make it easier for users to share information
via their established social ties, while protecting privacy by
not inviting unintended disclosure of personal details. It will
provide a single console for users to manage this data.
"Right now you manage different bits of personal
information in different places and to some extent it is a
fragmented user experience," Neal Sample, chief technical
architect of Yahoo's Open Strategy said in an interview.
Yahoo has been discussing pieces of the strategy to be more
open since last September. The details released on Thursday
marked the fullest discussion company officials have made so
far of its plans to rewire Yahoo from the inside out, both in
terms of underlying technical structure and user controls.
Yahoo was early to embrace the social media trend, where
users share details of their lives with selected friends
online, by acquiring companies such as photo-sharing site
Flickr in 2005, but has fallen behind in recent years.
Because Yahoo is seeking first to woo independent software
and Web services developers to support its open strategy, it
could be 2009 before mainstream consumers gain access to the
new services, Balogh said, in response to reporters questions.
"I don't think it's a matter of if, but rather, a question
of when," she wrote at http://tinyurl/55yhh3/.
(Editing by Quentin Bryar)
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