Yahoo’s New Social Strategy

Yahoo officials presented yesterday during a “Web 2.0” conference their plans for the site’s major makeover. The new direction searches for new advertising opportunities, as the site is going to host applications from other online services turning Yahoo into one of the biggest social hubs on the web.

Ari Balogh, Yahoo's chief technology officer, was quoted by the Associated Press telling the crowd: "We are going to rewire the entire experience at Yahoo to make it social in every dimension."

The plan is to allow its hundreds of millions of users to enjoy the old services such as Web mail, instant messaging and calendar but also include new features which contribute to the social experience, features made popular by social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.

"It is rewiring Yahoo from the inside out, across all of our properties, to fundamentally open up those Web services and provide a consistent development model, a consistent deployment and consumer experience as well," concluded Ari Balogh.

Yahoo also attempted to break into the Internet social scene by launching in 2005 a network called “Yahoo 360.” Unfortunately the application was recently closed due to a rather small impact in the media.

The new strategy is expected to be completed by the end of the year and an official launch date will be presented in the weeks to come. The move is believed to also raise the bar for the other major players such as Google, Microsoft, MySpace and Facebook.