Yahoo! has just announced the availability, in Spring 2008, of OneConnect, the second of its One range of mobile services. OneConnect is a presence enabled messaging service that puts your SMS, email, IM and social network conversations all in one place, categorized by user, not by 'Service.' Messaging communications are threaded, and you can see all your threaded communications with a specific contact in one place, along with their status, any recent updates they have made to community sites and so on.
Because Yahoo! Is using its own developer platform which it recently opened, pretty much any site, IM commmunity or user group can be added to the service. What Yahoo! appears to have done is build and launch what every one else is talking about the integration through open APIs of all your contacts and friends from your existing phone contact list, social network communities and email into one, presence-aware, location-aware, centralized contact list.
Marco Boerries, executive VP of Yahoo!'s Connected Life division, demonstrating the service, showed how users can view their contacts by name, by activity, by accessibility and by proximity.
The service can even use Bluetooth, GPS or cell info to discover the proximity of people who are not in your contact list.
Geraldine Wilson, vice president for Europe of Connected Life in Yahoo!, said that although users can download the client direct to the handset, or access the service through their web browser on the handset, Yahoo! remains committed to working with operators, and is not seeking to bypass the operator..
"We are a company with a proven record of long term partner relationships," she said. "When we partner with a company we benefit in terms of discovery and navigation, and the whole market grows for everyone." She also said that although Yahoo! has to give back a share of ad revenues to operators when it partners with them, it still remains in Yahho!'s interest to seek out partnerships.
"Many operators are really only starting to get to grips with IM, and this is so far ahead of that it takes a bit of time for them to get their heads round it. But this absolutely does not replace operators' SMS and IM strategies. In fact it builds on them and is likely to lead to increased usage and visibility of these services." Yahoo! Also announced that it has replaced Google as T-Mobile's search partner of choice for web 'n' walk. This brings the addressable community, although not the actual user base, for Yahoo! OneSearch up to 600 million, pretty much from scratch in a year.