Developers and tech brands have a weird array of names for their annual exhibitions and at this year’s Yahoo company product runway, new chief products officer Blake Irving has said that he wants to make Yahoo cool again (it’s arguable whether it ever was cool over here in the UK) and that they intend to concentrate on being a technology company rather than a media company. Oddly, perhaps, he intends to do this by concentrating on social media type products across the board including external sites.
You might want to call it micro-social networking or something similar because according to Irving, he wants to make changes to the way social networking is done at the moment. Rather than publishing to an entire network of friends on every topic conceivable, Internet users would have circles of friends that are interested in mroe specific topics.
For example, you could have one circle of friends that you meet down the gym that would be interested in health and fitness, and another circle of friends that you play XBox Live with and would rather talk about consoles and gaming. Currently, you would publish a story on either topic to your entire network but that could change under Yahoo rule.
It’s not just computer based Internet that will be enjoying the mass changes to the way we do things either. Internet connected devices like media players, TVs, and tablet computers. Again, this is sounding just as much a media thing as a technology thing but we’ll reserve judgement for now.
The upshot of all this is that Yahoo will release new and apparently innovative technology, and they will release it quickly rather than sitting around and waiting. It all sounds quite promising but the proof of the pudding and all that…
Do you think Yahoo were ever considered cool?
Can they be cool with their social micro-network idea?
Do they really need to give it a name as a starting point to get people excited about it?
