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A Web 2.0 Portal?
I've suggested to a number of people at Yahoo! that they ought to create a web 2.0 portal with the excellent web services they've purchased in the past 18 months; Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming, and several that they haven't but have been rumored to be interested in like Digg and Technorati. They could combine their excellent web search service, their social search product myweb, and even stuff like Yahoo! Answers and possibly 360.
They could create a second front door to Yahoo! for those who are used to a more social, interactive web.
Maybe they are working on doing just that, but I am not aware of it. It seems they are happy to leave Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming, etc alone for now. And maybe that's a good idea.
But according to Paid Content, AOL is going to do just that with its Netscape.com page.
If you visit Netscape, you'll see that AOL hasn't done it yet, but if the rumors I hear are true, we'll be seeing something shortly.
It will be interesting to see how AOL combines these web 2.0 approaches into a portal and it will also be interesting to see how Yahoo! reacts since they've got a bunch of the leading web 2.0 services in their portfolio now.
Comments (6) | Posted June 12, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
Fred,
I came across a post on Steve Rubel’s blog, Micro Persuasion, the other day titled, Yahoo Launches Social Media Gay Pride Site. I believe this is an answer to your question? It seems like Yahoo’s first attempt at integrating the various services they have developed/purchased recently.
http://events.yahoo.com/pride06/
I think this will be the first of many niche social media sites to come from Yahoo!.
Posted by: Ari Mir | Jun 12, 2006 1:23:05 PM
Why group the 2.0s together as though they are somehow apart from the rest of Yahoo's offerings or apart from the rest of the web? Or if they wanted to do a grouping of the social stuff, they'd toss in Groups.
Posted by: Amy | Jun 13, 2006 9:19:57 AM
Fred, I think that a "Backdoor 2.0" to a major portal site is a brilliant idea. Yahoo!, Google, MSN (Microsoft Live) or the new AOL (now with more Calacanis!) could all benefit from this idea and the Techcrunch crowd would be sufficiently placated as well. It would be trivial for any of these companies to buy or copy http://www.protopage.com/v2 or http://www1.goowy.com/ and populate them with their own internal modules. With portability and RSS feeds, you would decide on your homepage brand by figuring out who offered you more services, but you'd have the ability to pull from the others. Mine would be a mostly Yahoo page (email, del.icio.us, flickr) but I like Google maps.
Posted by: Marc Nathan | Jun 13, 2006 4:57:12 PM
http://next.yahoo.com/ lists many of Yahoo!'s new offerings, but isn't focused on recent purchases -- perhaps because there's innovation happening internally too.
Posted by: J.D. Falk | Jun 14, 2006 5:06:23 PM
I would add Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) to the above-mentioned list of "sites doing it already while YHOO gets it together."
I just moved my favorite feeds from Bloglines over to this site, and have not been back to Bloglines since. It offers a bit more control over the layout and tabbed organization than what I found with Protopage or Goowy.
Posted by: Chris | Jun 16, 2006 2:00:48 PM
You may want to take a look at GROU.PS
It addresses exactly the same issue.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | Jun 17, 2006 12:12:40 AM
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