~ Jerome Garot

while it’s obvious that news feeds have been one of the biggest user experience innovations of the past 5 years (pioneered by LiveJournal, not Facebook actually), it’s already old news. the fact that it takes 3+ years and acquisitions for the other large portal battleships to turn about make it clear how far behind they really are. Google is the only one that’s even close to having a competitive offering, and they wouldn’t even be close if it weren’t for MySpace opting to use OpenSocial as part of its foundation.

meanwhile, the train has already left the station on using social networks as identity mgmt systems. except that again, YHOO/MSFT/AOL and even GOOG are playing catchup about 1-3 years too late. even MySpace is moving faster than the rest of those folks. Google is barely even launching its social standard on its own properties (nothing on Gmail or YouTube yet, minimally on iGoogle even). and i STILL can’t create a basic friends list that’s portable to other 3rd-party services from my Gmail account. unless i’ve missed something, this is also true for Yahoo & MSFT on their mail systems.

of course, no one has closed the loop yet on the 3rd leg of the stool: payments. when that happens, look for usage & monetization to explode.

sorry this is a long rant in the comments. should be a blog post on my own site.

anyway, good piece om…. but i think you’re not being critical enough of how late the major players are to the table. Arguably, YHOO, MSFT, & AOL have missed out on HUGE amounts of innovation & value by waiting to so long on using hosted email as a social networking platform. and even though Google has tried to play its hand well, the results do not look terribly promising thus far.

as much as Facebook is criticized for lack of monetization, the rest of the big players should be criticized even more harshly for lack of vision, strategy, and execution on social platforms. Google gets a B- or C+, MSFT & AOL get Ds, and Yahoo gets a big fat F.

While Yahoo *did* acquire mybloglog…does it have the “panache” of friendfeed? Nope, not according to most bloggers…while it has that functionality, it didn’t go on to do the whole “mybloglogging of Yahoo”…like flickr was supposed to do (eg, the “flickrization of Yahoo” from the 2005-2007 era, as I was ending my time there).

Fast forward to today:
AOL =…what’s TMZ got to do with it? Oh, right, that’s where the value is, in the stuff that doesn’t have the AOL name & people don’t think is *part* of AOL.
Yahoo = disconnected pile of stuff, which in pieces is pretty cool, in sum, isn’t nearly as good as the parts.
Facebook = only hot as long as they lose money…once they need to, they’re done, *unless* then can figure out non punch the monkey revenue.

Lifestreaming, friend news feeds etc don’t a company make…it’s the utility of the product, the interconnectedness of the parts, the experience that make it fun, new and gain traction.

Carol Bartz (and Tim Armstrong, imho) both need to re-read “The Innovator’s Dillemma” and think about a “Spin – In” concept, whereby they cr@p something based on their parts that can grow, scale and eventually swallow back the mothership…as righting the old won’t make them competitive.

Cheers,
-c

Cody Simms
Senior Director, Product Management
Yahoo! Open Strategy

It is not clear what youa re trying to say. Can you elaborate?