In February 2010, Yahoo got to watch with schadenfreude (幸灾乐祸) as Google drove its new Buzz social network straight over a cliff with inadequate privacy controls. Now Yahoo has decided it wants to head for pretty much the same cliff, just with a slightly firmer grip on the wheel.
Yahoo is enhancing its Yahoo Updates service, a relatively unknown social network that allows users to post status updates, photos, and other content by integrating it directly into Yahoo Mail. The numbers make a compelling case: Yahoo Mail has some 280 nil]lion users; so if it can flip a switch and create a social network around that--why, it’d be a sudden player against Facebook, a global force at nearly 500 million users, and Twitter, at 75 million.
No doubt that is the same thought that occurred to Google when it introduced Buzz as an add--on to its popular Gmail service. That launch didn’t go so well. Yahoo is paying close attention to the mistakes Google made, especially the flaw that allowed some users’ lists of frequently e-mailed contacts to go public. Yahoo says it has been slowly adding Updates function to its various products--Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Profiles--and studying how users respond.
The next frontier is to merge Updates with Yahoo’s most important product by far: e-mall. The company is building in a member of safeguards. Users can set limits on each specific activity, turning Updates off entirely with a single click, or managing even more detailed settings on individual posts.
Despite all this, Yahoo may find that users still freak out when social networking mingles with their e-mail on any level. Social networks are about sharing, and e-mail services are intensely private. Nevertheless, with Updates, Yahoo can probably avoid the kind of privacy complaint that troubled Buzz and stung Facebook simply because of the fact that the company, which has long been in disorder, is not watched as closely as those two giants. Under new CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo is attempting to pull into focus and make a few excellent products instead of a mixture of moderate ones. A successful merging of social networking with its massive e-marl base would be quite a trick, but the odds aren’t in Yahoo’s favor.

What could be the difference between social networks and email services（）

In February 2010, Yahoo got to watch with schadenfreude (幸灾乐祸) as Google drove its new Buzz social network straight over a cliff with inadequate privacy controls. Now Yahoo has decided it wants to head for pretty much the same cliff, just with a slightly firmer grip on the wheel.
Yahoo is enhancing its Yahoo Updates service, a relatively unknown social network that allows users to post status updates, photos, and other content by integrating it directly into Yahoo Mail. The numbers make a compelling case: Yahoo Mail has some 280 nil]lion users; so if it can flip a switch and create a social network around that--why, it’d be a sudden player against Facebook, a global force at nearly 500 million users, and Twitter, at 75 million.
No doubt that is the same thought that occurred to Google when it introduced Buzz as an add--on to its popular Gmail service. That launch didn’t go so well. Yahoo is paying close attention to the mistakes Google made, especially the flaw that allowed some users’ lists of frequently e-mailed contacts to go public. Yahoo says it has been slowly adding Updates function to its various products--Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Profiles--and studying how users respond.
The next frontier is to merge Updates with Yahoo’s most important product by far: e-mall. The company is building in a member of safeguards. Users can set limits on each specific activity, turning Updates off entirely with a single click, or managing even more detailed settings on individual posts.
Despite all this, Yahoo may find that users still freak out when social networking mingles with their e-mail on any level. Social networks are about sharing, and e-mail services are intensely private. Nevertheless, with Updates, Yahoo can probably avoid the kind of privacy complaint that troubled Buzz and stung Facebook simply because of the fact that the company, which has long been in disorder, is not watched as closely as those two giants. Under new CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo is attempting to pull into focus and make a few excellent products instead of a mixture of moderate ones. A successful merging of social networking with its massive e-marl base would be quite a trick, but the odds aren’t in Yahoo’s favor.