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Yahoo! Rushes Forward With oneConnect |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Wednesday, 13 February 2008 |
In its quest to become the leading player
in the mobile portal space, Yahoo! has announced a new communications
service to complement its Yahoo!oneSearch offering. The unified messaging platform, Yahoo! oneConnect brings a number of Yahoo! and other services into a single point for mobile users.
Demonstrated
at the GSMA
Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in Spain, Yahoo! oneConnect is set
to be released when the company makes Yahoo! Go 3.0 available. Go 3.0
is currently in Beta.
Billed
as "the first mobile product with an open architecture
that aggregates communications tools - email, instant messaging,
SMS messaging, and social networks" the new offering will have Widgets
so users can access their email from email
providers, such as Hotmail, Gmail, AOL
Mail in addition to its own Yahoo! Mail.
The company plans to go
further, however, and says it is in discussions with DataViz to port
its RoadSynch
and Documents To Go applications which allow access to corporate
Microsoft
Exchange and Office documents across into widget format.
On the social networking side, Yahoo! says oneConnect will have
a "Socially-connected address book" which will integrate with "popular"
social networks as well as professional networks,
and communities. Users will be able to view status updates, photo
uploads, and the
recent activity ("pulse") of contacts across all their networks.
The
service will also take social networking to a new level offering a
location-sensing technology that will allow users to locate,
chat with, and exchange contact information with other nearby Yahoo!
oneConnect users. Proximity alerts will notify consumers when a contact
enters their vicinity.
The service will take a huge step forward in integrating SMS and IM
promising seamless integration between the two and supporting threaded
conversations.
Hoping to draw in more support Yahoo!
will give oneConnect opan APIs allowing other messaging services such
as Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger and MSN
Messenger to integrate with the platform, although it does not give any
indication whether those networks are interested in joining in
withoneConnect.
What the company does say though is that it now has more than
29 partners in oneSearch, with the addition of T-Mobile, which it has
hijacked from a relationship with Google. The agreement is a bit of a
blow for Google in Europe and delivers
around 90 million mobile users into Yahoo!'s waiting arms. It seems the
T-Mobile deal is more than superficial with the carrier saying the
partnership is strategic and that the two believe they can have a
"longer and
deeper relationship".
The deal takes Yahoo!'s mobile footprint to more than 600 million globally.
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