Un pò di storia: Facebook nasce nel 2004 come sito che si propone di tenere in contatto gli studenti  di Harward. Il suo creatore è Mark Zuckenberg, che nel 2007 si prende il lusso di rifiutare l'offerta Yahoo di acquisto per un miliardo di dollari. Ora il suo valore è triplicato. Pensate in 4 anni un'idea vale come minimo 3 o 4 milardi di dollari. Non male come rendimento per un'idea.

Ora Facebook si sta spostando sul telefonino, quindi il social networking esplode: basta pensare al numero di cellulari a disposizione molto maggiore del numero dei computer oggi in uso. Il cellulare è sempre con la persona in ogni momento, sta diventando sempre più un prolungamento del corpo della persona soprattutto in Italia, dove una persona ha in media 2,5 telefonini.  In questo scenario già da molti mesi si sta parlando del passaggio dal web 2.0 al web 3.0, caratterizzato dalla connessione continua della persona alle attività della Rete. Questa connessione sarà possibile grazie al cellulare. Nel web 3.0 la persona potrà dedicarsi a attività sociali, commerciali e ricreative in qualsiasi momento della giornata e da qualsiasi luogo.  Il privato diventa pubblico, il pubblico diventa privato, non c'è più separazione tra sfera lavorativa e sfera privata, tra tempo di lavoro e tempo di riposo.

Vi segnalo due novità interessanti:

Yahoo ha appena presentato "oneConnect" un'applicazione che porta sul cellulare tutti i contatti personali presenti su computer e nelle community in cui l'utente è abitualmente registrato. E' facile quindi rimanere in contatto con le persone dela propria community quando si è lontani dal computer.

Buongiorno partirà invece tra qualche settimana con Blinko, piattaforma tecnologicamente studiata per portare sul cellulare le Web community della Rete. Una opportunità è rappresentata dal raggruppamento degli amici, che potrà essere realizzato attraverso i numeri telefonici della rubrica, oppure i contatti delle chat di Msn o di Icq.

Il futuro sembra  essere sempre più nel social network.

]]> http://techbays.wordpress.com/?p=1376 Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:01:18 +0000 Carlo Maglinao http://techbays.com/2008/09/17/yahoo-oneconnect-on-iphone/ I added the free Yahoo! oneConnect - yes, it is now available - on my iTouch, which is the third application I use to access Facebook on a mobile device. First is via Blackberry; second via iTouch Facebook application. Now, via oneConnect. I'm sure applications like HelloTxt will add their own iPhone app with similar integrations as well.

Yahoo! oneConnect allows me to sync my Yahoo Contacts and view contacts that are online available to chat. You can add other accounts including Bebo, Dopplr, Flickr, Last.fm, MySpace, Twitter, and Youtube. Once these applications are added, you can view your friends' statuses via the Pulse feature: a Friendfeed type of service without the comments and likes.

Tapping on a status opens the friend's profile in separate browser. The addition of Twitter on my oneConnect account unfortunately obscures the other apps' status updates. I have to consider removing Twitter on 1C.

I recommend using oneConnect, especially if you're a Y! Messenger user. It simplifies accessing your contacts and messages.

Yahoo released a preview version of a free new iPhone application called OneConnect that can centralize communications and social-networking activity.

With Yahoo! oneConnect you’ll be free to use all your favorite communications tools and services to connect with anyone, at anytime. From IM or text, email or social networks; Yahoo! oneConnect intends to integrate all the ways you communicate into a unique, mobile experience. Imagine having all your contact information at your fingertips; email, phone numbers, text, and IM addresses; in one location—your phone.

]]> http://hongkongphooey.wordpress.com/?p=1532 Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:34:13 +0000 hongkongphooey http://hongkongphooey.es.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/first-look-yahoo-oneconnect/

Bet most of you instant message (IM) a lot or even on multiple platforms daily with your buddies. I for one uses meebo daily to IM my friends on MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ and AIM (see my previous post on What is My Meebo). Apart from IMs, social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter had been springing up rapidly the past year or two. Now, imagine having them all under one application.

According to Tech Digest, "(oneConnect) It's expected to be included in Yahoo's Go 3.0 application by June this year. I was really impressed at how slick it is, and how neatly it presents the different information from all these different Web 2.0 feeds. There's a Pulse feature that lets you see people's profile updates and photo uploads too."

Sounds too good to be true, but it seems like Yahoo still having problems with Microsoft and Facebook on the inclusion of Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger and Facebook in oneConnect. Guess we have to wait and see how this all turns out but no doubt the concept is neat and the interface looks sleek.

Yahoo! OneConnect nos ofrece una nueva forma de comunicarnos con el móvil. Por primera vez tendrás en un sólo lugar, contactos, actividades y formas de comunicarte desde un dispositivo móvil.

Esta aplicación te permite usar los servicios de Yahoo! (messenger, email, etc) pero también integra otras redes sociales, de forma que podrás ver los últimos mensajes de Facebook, fotos de MySpace o conectar con LinkedIn. Puedes ver qué contactos están conectados, los que se encuentran cerca de tí y comunicarte directamente con ellos.

Estará disponible con Yahoo! Go 3.0 y en la página de Yahoo! Móvil a partir del segundo trimestre del año.

Via Xatakamóvil | Sitio Yahoo! Mobile

I have been avoiding speculations or engage in any form of discussions about some topics lately...

I also didn't want to turn this blog into a "publicity channel" for whatever I am doing at work. I still would like to keep this blog as a platform for explorations on PR, new media, technology as well as my favourite topic - books!

However, I did think about my friend's question and here're my thoughts.... Hell no! No regrets at all. Although I admit, there are days that are tougher, what is really special about my new job is, people are extremely passionate about what they are doing at Yahoo! It is a very different experience. I had my fair share of bad clients and bad colleagues in the past jobs who made going to work feels like the end of the world.

Right now, I am busy. This is easily one of the busiest jobs I ever had but I am loving it! In my very short time (this is my 6th week) with the company, I can't help but noticed a few things about the place - what I was told before I joined the company was true... it has a great culture. Beside the great view at my work desk (next to the full-length glass window, on the 37th floor of Suntec City Tower), I love working with alot of truly great, talented and extremely cool people.

Sure, it is sad to read some negative news coverage but what I find encouraging is, everyone works together and despite tough times, we are having fun and we work hard to achieve what we set out to do.

And this week, we see some great results as Yahoo! made various announcements at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. One of which is the new Yahoo! oneConnect (read more on TechCrunch) and read what many others wrote.. .

“A few of the innovative features of oneConnect are its Pulse feature, which lets users see what their friends are up to, including their status, profile updates and recommendations based on their social network pages, and Status, which lets users see their contacts by their most recent status updates on social networks, as well as update their own status on their social networks and automatically broadcast it to their friends” – RCR WirelessNews

 

“Yahoo continues firing on all cylinders in the mobile area despite the looming presence of Microsoft's aggressive moves to acquire the Web giant.” – InternetNews

"oneConnect is a very promising and I'm not surprised Yahoo is moving ahead," Gartner analyst Mike McGuire told InternetNews.com. "Yahoo can't be paralyzed by what Microsoft says it wants to do -- it has these developments and deals in place and as [CEO] Jerry Yang has said to his employees, they have to focus on what they need to work on."

“Has Yahoo beaten Google to the punch?” – TechWorld

 

"OneConnect is part of a strategy to open up Yahoo services to work side by side with those of rival services, thereby making itself a more relevant starting point for users seeking to find what's going on the web.” – ZDNet UK

On a side note, the coming Monday is my 30th birthday. To me, it is a brand new chapter of life - a new starting point to more great things. I have a lot of goals set for the next 5 years and I have been very blessed. I am surrounded by great friends, colleagues and family who have been so awfully wonderful. Thank you to all those who sent me all the lovely birthday wishes, gifts and stuff!

Mobile carriers need to step up their game and make mobile services easier to use, says Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, lest they willingly hand over business to media giants like Google. Sarin made the comments when speaking to the press during this week's Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, admitting that his industry has not traditionally done a good job in making new mobile services appealing to users. Not doing anything to fix that, will be the industry's biggest mistake, he said.

And another quote from that article:

Mobile carriers have the experience and opportunity to keep these customers from slipping away. But in order to do so, they have to offer something up besides a means for other companies to transport data. "Customers want social networking, email, SMS, instant messaging, voice—you name it," Sarin said. "Communication is our core business. We have to be in all of these spaces."

Oh boy is he in trouble. Let's see where he is coming from. Traditionally, Mobile operators have one advantage that other companies don't have. They offer access to the mobile network. Mobile operators have the monopoly on that. They own the network and monetize users accessing it. There was never a need for the operators to even think about user experience or user services. No need to compete over services, just deliver access and use clever marketing techniques to make your mobile brand more interesting than the other mobile brands. And that is fine in a world where access and the ability to communicate anywhere is the most important user value.

The same thing happened when the Internet grew big in the 90's. People all went to Internet access providers because they needed access. That was fine for a while, but then other companies realised that once people were on-line there was a much bigger revenue stream available to those that provided the user value in services. There isn't a single Internet access company that has successfully made the switch from access to user value services.You still get charged for access, but you probably don't use their e-mail service or spam filters or whatever service any more. E-mail is free and with more storage you can imagine. Other companies filled the gap with anti-virus, spam, and content services. And the Internet access companies are stuck to do what they do best, provide access. They have all tried to create their own content services and failed. They have tried to build advertisement platforms but others moved much faster. It is the penalty for a company that provides nothing more than a pretty expensive plumbing system underlying our on-line experiences.

So Mr Sarin and all other mobile operator executives can try to become user value service providers but they will fail at it. Google, Yahoo, and many other companies have already taken up that part of the revenue stream. They couldn't be bothered by mobile networks, access technology and the like. They concentrate on what matters in the end. The user experience. Marginalising the role of the Mobile operator to what it does best, providing access.

And then I read this article which talks about a panel discussion between user experience and technology experts during the Mobile World congress. A quote from the article:

The panel, whose title was It's the User Experience, Stupid agreed that iPhone represents a model for mobile operators to follow, but they reached little agreement on how to follow.

One direction, advocated by Lucia Predolin, international marketing and communications director for Buongirono S.p.A. of Milan, Italy, is to manipulate users by identifying their "need states" — including such compulsions as "killing time," and "making the most of it" — and fulfilling them subliminally.

Adobe's Murarka proposed a more technological approach to improving the user experience, satisfying the mobile phone subscriber through better interface design. Sarah Lipman, co-founder and R&D director for Power2B, suggested an almost mystical solution, somehow tapping into users' "neural networks" to navigate a mobile phone interface "using touch and pre-touch input."

Never, never trust an International Marketing and Communications director that wants to "manipulate" users. Or someone that wants to "tap into users neural networks". These people do not have a clue. If this is the innovating power from the mobile industry we will remain in a mobile stone age for a bit longer.

Apple understood that usability, status, and the ability to show of yet another cool device where the first step into improving the mobile experience with their launch of the iPhone. Before the iPhone usability sucks on almost any mobile device. And I'm not the only one that feels that way. It turns out that Apple iPhone users perform 50 times more search requests than other mobile phone users. What is interesting to me, which isn't mentioned in the source, is whether the searches are performed using the mobile network or a WiFi network. Big difference in my opinion, as the first one costs the uer money, while the second option simply turns the iPhone into a small handheld computer.

In another article it is even suggested that within a few years the number of mobile search requests will overtake fixed Internet searches. Which is true, but sort of obvious. Already here are more mobile devices on the planet than there are fixed Internet computers. If we marginally decrease the complexity to be able to access the web mobile, then people are bound to start using search engines. Good news for Google? They think so.

I do not necessarily agree with that. While more search suggest more advertisement revenues I can't help but think that we don't need more search. We need an entire different information access paradigm that is build upon the foundation of a small mobile device. Instead of the current "let's copy our laptop web experience and cram it on a device with a screen no larger than a few inches and pretty unusable input interfaces". We definitely need to improve the usability of mobile devices, but before that we need a revolution in mobile UI thinking.

Is Yahoo's announcement of their new mobile service OneConnect the answer to this? Not sure about that. I saw a demo video of the new service that is to launch in the third quarter of this year and although it combines all kinds of social networks into a single portal, it seems rather complex and technical to me.  Sure, it's cool they can connect all major social networks and track people on them, but in itself that is a technical solution to a problem I haven't experienced yet.  What underlying user value has lead to this service other than "lets make sure we can connect to all these cool services so that we can get lots of users and a big market share. Can you imagine trying to set up that service on your mobile phone and actually make it work with a single button press? Now that would be a cool trick. Honestly, I did ask for such a service last year already, I still wonder if Yahoo has been reading up on my blog. They got me one thing I asked for, but forgot the other great ideas I mentioned in that post ;-)

Mobile is considered the most important growth market. Forget the Internet, mobile is where the action will be the coming years. Maybe that's why Microsoft has replaced its entire management team on Mobile. With massive markets waiting to be unlocked in India, China, Africa, there is more money to be made on the mobile web than the fixed web. But if we have to wait for these 10 most important trends from the Mobile World congress I would say dream on. There are lots of little, currently unknown companies out there that understand human behaviour, mobile technology and user needs on the move. These companies will come with services not thought of before. And some of them will become as big as Google and Yahoo now are on the Web.

A yahoo começa finalmente a dar mostras de estar de pé (até parece que a oferta da Microsoft reavivou o pessoal de lá) com os ultimos lançamentos que tem realizado para Web 2.0. Desta vez durante a GSMA Mobile World Congress anunciou o lançamento do Yahoo OneConnect serviço que permitirá que usuarios de dispositivos moveis possam agregar as suas actualizações em redes sociais e serviços de mensagens. O interessante disso tudo é que será um serviço padronizado, ou seja poderá ser usado para varias redes sociais como Facebook, Myspace, orkut etc.

Este foi desenhado para acomodar num só lugar móvel, as várias formas de comunicação online.

O interface é uma espécie de widget...

Tem ligações a vários serviços de webmail conhecidos, tais como o Gmail e o da Yahoo!

Tanto IM como SMS, de redes diferentes, podem ser combinadas num único interface por threads tipo iPhone.

As social networks também terão um papel importante, através de um componente chamado Pulse, que providenciará updates recentes de múltiplas redes, incluindo Facebook, MySpace, e outras conhecidas!

Cada contacto terá para além da informação básica, os emails e conversas por IM ou SMS recentes, dando-nos assim a oportunidade de seguir os nossos amigos, independentemente do meio de comunicação que eles usem!

Algumas implementações incluirão a nossa localização, permitindo que a malta nos encontre, e no futuro também esperam integrar o email do Microsoft Exchange e os documentos do Office no mesmo interface.

A plataforma oneConnect será aberta e incluirá um interface de programação para os nerds que quererão adicionar os seus próprios serviços no sistema de mensagens.

O Yahoo! espera lançar tanto a versão web como uma aplicação dedicada do serviço durante a Primavera.