Yahoo Simplifies Online Data Sharing Between Friends (
Page 1 of 2 )
Yahoo is looking to unify its services to enable users to better connect and share information with each other online. By Eric Auchard
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc is working to rewire the dozens
of services across its site so that users can manage all information
about themselves in a single place and share it with friends across the
Web.
"We are not building another social network," Chief Technology
Officer Ari Balogh told more than 1,000 attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo
conference in San Francisco on Thursday. "We are building social into
everything we do."
The effort is part of a larger plan to make it easier for users to
share information about themselves with other Yahoo users and on
websites that run applications using Yahoo features, seeking to help
the world's biggest Internet media company keep pace with social
networks like Facebook and MySpace.
Yahoo is spelling out this evolving strategy in the face of Microsoft Corp's looming, $44 billion unsolicited takeover offer.
Microsoft has set a deadline of Saturday for Yahoo to agree to a
deal on those terms or face a hostile takeover campaign. The software
giant said on Thursday it will announce whether it plans to proceed
with a deal or pull out next week.
Unified user profiles and the effort to make it easier for users to
share information with their friends is part of the company's broader
"Yahoo Open Strategy" due out later this year, Balogh said. The plan
would give users simple privacy controls to decide what data they
reveal about themselves.
"We are going to unify all profiles throughout Yahoo," said Balogh,
whose appointment as Yahoo's CTO was announced on January 29, a day
before Microsoft first proposed its $31 per share cash and stock offer
to merge with Yahoo.
