Yahoo continues to consolidate the mobile web experience with oneConnect
Yahoo continues to innovate in the mobile world with its announcement today of Yahoo oneConnect. This open architecture product will combine email, instant messaging, text messaging and social networking all into one simplified area.
This new service, set to be a part of both their Yahoo! Go 3.0 platform (our coverage) as well as their new mobile homepage in the 2nd quarter of 2008, is a continuation of the consolidation trend Yahoo started last with their oneSearch product. By providing an open gateway to access other services, Yahoo is leveling the playing field a bit and could give rise to other new mobile startups.
Mobile consolidation is important as simplification is needed on smaller devices to create a user experience on par with the one they receive on their computers. Yahoo claims to have 29 partnerships in place now for oneSearch, covering more than 600 million subscribers.
Yahoo’s oneConnect will feature the ability to tie together popular emailing and instant messaging clients from the likes of not only Yahoo, but also Google, AOL and Microsoft. It will also feature the ability to send and receive updates from most social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and LinkedIn as well as many other popular social tools such as Twitter, Flickr and Last.fm.
With such an impressive feature list, Yahoo is no doubt hoping that the combination of oneConnect alongside oneSearch will eventually make its Go platform the de-facto mobile application of choice. In some regards oneConnect seems like a combination of two of Google’s hottest projects, OpenSocial and Android, yet it should be ready to go before either of those are finished. This looks promising for Yahoo.
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About the Author, MG Siegler
MG Siegler writes about technology trends and new media for VentureBeat, with a focus on mobile topics, social elements and key news stories. Before that, MG wrote about technology on his blog, ParisLemon. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan where he studied film. He's previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he did web development. He now lives in San Francisco.