http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2006/12/why-google-yahoo-and-microsoft-should.html

Your suggestion of cloning facebook could potentially work, but Yahoo’s management is simply so poor that the likelihood of properly executing a kill-facebook plan would be low if not nil.

If anyone from Yahoo is reading this and would like my detailed 2 cents (my email is thw@wharton.upenn.edu). I’ve competed with Facebook in Singapore (I launched an SNS with less than $2k got 3500 users, and Facebook jumped in roughly 1 mth after us.

Our realization was that the SNS model alone simply doesn’t work.

Those of you who believe that Facebook is entrenched permanently are dead wrong. What all of you are forgetting is that there is a significantly larger K-12 market, particularly for High School students. These users are unencumbered with pre-conceptions, and many of them have not registered or even heard of Facebook. (Many of you will recall Facebook’s huge push into the HS market, Facebook knows that it needs to secure the HS market and continue to secure it – or else their advantage will slowly dissipate).

There are 4-4.5 mm incoming college students (roughly 1/3-1/4 of Facebook’s total base). Facebook will likely keep its lead with Classes below 2010-2011 and with college alumni, but if Yahoo was to make a strong push, they should do it in K-12, and integrate an Education package.

This is my kill two birds with one stone approach: -Rapidly deploy an Education suite (like Google Apps for Education) with an SNS built in -Approach IT Admins at schools and offer Yahoo Mail (in the school’s interface) with 1 gb as a replacement for School Webmails (most IT admins will fall over themselves to take Yahoo up on this, especially since Google is lagging with Gmail approvals) (this will enable Yahoo to grab users fast, college students check their email as much or more than facebook) -Buy a Learning Management System (something like Blackboard and integrate it with the SNS): this will enable Yahoo to integrate courses and homework (even more traffic to monetize) and great for K-12s or Colleges that don’t want to pay Blackboard $1mm/yr in license fees). -Customize the system for New Student Orientations (several schools such as UChicago, Upenn already offer Facebook/Friendster clones to their new students during orientation, Yahoo should actively court these schools)

Rapidly promote the product to K-12s and to Colleges. Get market share.

This strategy if executed properly would enable Yahoo to fight back Google in the Education space (something Yahoo doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to, but is critical) and grab users en masse through administrative channels (e.g. Webmail, etc.).

BTW my company is working on the “kill two birds with one stone” strategy so if anyone from Yahoo is reading, seriously email me. You guys are missing ideas and plans, I have plans + ideas + a deployable system.

…that’s the ticket. Organic networks forming around actual usage of Yahoo’s services…maybe even the addition of an ajaxian widget that, as you navigate the Yahoo network, shows profiles that match a certain number/type of your preferences on that service…so your “friends” are constantly morphing based on ‘where’you are and what you are doing/have done on the Yahoo network..and when you “save” a story, or photo or vid, or post, to your widget’s “save” box, it saves it as well to your organic network friends widget’s inbox. And you can set your preference to view selected friend’s input, or view-all.

Getting users is the tricky part. Simply cloning facebook isn’t going to inspire any users to either switch sites or even to use both products at once.

IMHO, if there’s any acquisitions that Yahoo should be looking at, it’s SixApart and/or Technorati. Blogs are still social media, and Livejournal is still alive and kicking as a social networking site goes. And Yahoo’s got nothing right not as far as blogging goes, that’s the hole they need to plug.

But even that said – it’d be smarter for them to focus on what they have.

Rather than try to clone Facebook, I’d suggest to Yahoo that they leverage their real strength: A mind boggling array of properties that capture almost every interest a person could have. Introduce a high level “Yahoo profile” with social network features (friends lists and the such), and span it across everything; let organic networks form around photo sharing, autos, cooking, even finance – with that profile being customized according to whatever site section you’re looking at.

Or minimally they should brush the dust off of their groups offering and better integrate their other services into that (Like why does each group get an abhorrent interface that allows all of 10 mb of photos, instead of simply linking itself to a Flickr photo pool?)