Interesting piece in the New York Times about Yahoo and Google planning on turning their E-Mail systems and personalized home pages into social networks - the goal of-course is to give FaceBook and MySpace a run for their money. If Yahoo and Google can actually make this happen we could potentially see the end of email as we know it today.
Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.
On the surface this looks like a no-brainer because the mapping or connection between people a.k.a social graph is already available to the email systems and quite simply is the core or heart of any email application. When you send an email to an individual or a group of people you are essentially creating or continuing a relationship with the individuals in your To, cc and bcc fields.
“The exciting part is that a lot of this information already exists on our network, but it’s dormant,” Mr. Garlinghouse said.
What Yahoo is missing in this vision is a personal profile, where users express their interests and personality to others. Yahoo, of course, has had many different takes on this over the years: its member directory, Geocities, Yahoo 360. It recently started Yahoo Mash. But none of these is quite right, Mr. Garlinghouse said. Mash is simply an experiment, not a product being readied for mass promotion.
There will be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0, he said. For people who use a lot of Yahoo services, this profile could be quite rich even at the beginning, as it can draw on activity on Yahoo Music, Yahoo Shopping and so on.
The fundamental difference right now between email and social networks is the user profile or rather the lack of it. In addition to that I might add, the lack of widgets (FaceBook calls them apps) that enable “socializing”. IMO if Yahoo and Google can “socialize” email we could not only see email evolving into social networks but also the potential of it penetrating into the work place will be inevitable. The road block for the work place of-course is privacy and IP protection. Social networking sites in their current state are not exactly secure and conducive to business. But if existing enterprise email systems are “socialized” then the security infrastructure will already be in place.
It will be interesting to see how this one pans out!
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Hello,
This whole idea though, completely MISSES the point of e-mail. the E-mail is an extension of normal mail (or snail mail) as we know it. The major upside of having e-mail was to communicate privately and immediately to someone with an important message. I believe that social networking by Google and Yahoo will not do away with e-mail at all since that will undermine he whole purpose. Ofcourse if it does create communities like Facebook, the market will face oversaturation. What is Facebook, but a datamining company, which in turn for its free social service, collects user data to learn their habits and therefore make advertising effective? Too much advertising then? Too much data mining? Just like when advertising on Radio started, it was direct advertising IN THE HOME. Do we want practically every corporation to learn everything about us, know our weaknesses and blackmail us (Albeit indirectly)? Something to think about.
Thank you.