Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network
Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems …
Context & Ripple Effects
The move lands three weeks after the Wall Street Journal asked whether social features could make email sexy again — and Google and Yahoo are answering yes at the same time, with plans the report describes as near-identical. It also marks an about-face on each company's own social portfolio: Orkut, whose global reach Business Week profiled just last month (Google's Orkut: A World of Ambition), plus OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360, are all set aside as the two companies pivot to the inbox instead.
The strategic logic is defensive: with MySpace and Facebook pulling users into standalone profiles, the largest holders of existing relationship data are choosing not to compete for a new destination but to socialize what they already own. The story traveled quickly — Read/WriteWeb picked it up the same day under a telling headline, 'Yahoo! Says the Future Will be Modeled on Facebook.'
First-order effects
- Google and Yahoo's own standalone social efforts — Orkut, Yahoo Mash, Yahoo 360 and the OpenSocial framework — are effectively demoted in favor of making Gmail and Yahoo Mail the social layer itself, putting their combined webmail user bases forward as ready-made social graphs.
- Facebook and MySpace face incumbents who no longer need users to visit a new site to be 'networked,' since the contact list already lives in the mailbox.
Second-order effects
- Third-party developers aligned around OpenSocial must now target the inbox as a distribution surface rather than dedicated social sites, reshaping where widgets and apps get built.
- MySpace and Facebook are pressed to respond on the incumbents' turf — either deepening ties with webmail providers or accelerating features that replicate address-book-driven discovery inside their own walls.
Third-order effects
- If the Inbox 2.0 pattern holds, the social graph consolidates around whoever owns daily communication rather than whoever builds the flashiest profile page — shifting the locus of social-network competition from destinations to embedded infrastructure.
- It also sets up the possibility that rivals who cannot match the incumbent mail bases will seek alliances instead of going alone, making partnership structures — rather than standalone launches — the default path into consumer social software.
The trend: Consumer internet incumbents are responding to the social-networking wave not by launching new destinations but by retrofitting their highest-frequency existing products — above all webmail — into social platforms.