Thursday March 31, 2005

Clearly Yahoo!360 demonstrates Yahoo!'s competency: building a relationship with its users. All of the web mail, 'My Yahoo!' and 'Yahoo! Groups' user features are basically good personalized outward looking experiences with (more or less) single sign-on. Contrast this with Google's user features: the disconnected islands of GMail, Orkut and Blogger each have separate identities and user populations.

360 adds to Y!'s feature set social networking, blogging and integrates with (some) other Y! features seamlessly. I anticipate seeing Flickr and other innovative features making their way into this soon enough. So it's transforming from a personalized outward looking platform to one for personalized networking. Google's core competency seems to be stuck at "sooner or later, we're indexing everything" -- not that that's a bad thing. Unlocking the world's accumulated knowledge is cool.

So while I don't know if I agree that Yahoo! has overtaken Google, they're both clearly magnifying what they're good at lately. And I'm sure the Googlers aren't sitting still, they've got some smarty pants people there. In the meantime, Yahoo! clearly knows mores about providing a platform for people.