Yahoo to launch MyM "social messaging" site [Scoop]
Yahoo has launched, in an invitation-only trial, MyM, a "social messaging" service. How many social networks does one company need? Nowhere are Yahoo's scattershot efforts more evident than in this field.
Context & Ripple Effects
MyM is at least the third social bet Yahoo has running simultaneously this fall. The company opened its Mash social network in September, and just ten days before this scoop it was reported to be planning Inbox 2.0, turning e-mail itself into a social network — a plan Yahoo has since confirmed. Valleywag's framing is that these efforts are scattershot rather than a single strategy.
The timing matters because Yahoo's core social asset is under pressure: reporting earlier this month said teenagers are abandoning their Yahoo e-mail accounts, which is precisely the base any social or messaging play needs. MyM arrives as an invitation-only trial, so the immediate question among watchers is not what MyM does but why it exists separately from Mash and from the inbox plan.
First-order effects
- Yahoo now runs two invitation-only social products — Mash and MyM — plus a confirmed e-mail-as-social-network plan, meaning its invite lists, engineering attention, and brand messaging compete internally for the same users.
- Invited early users must judge yet another standalone Yahoo social destination, splitting whatever engagement remains on properties already bleeding younger users to other networks.
Second-order effects
- Rival Google is pursuing the same inbox-as-social-network thesis reported in the Bits piece, so Yahoo faces pressure to pick one social anchor quickly rather than fund parallel experiments while Google converges on its mail base.
- Each new silo dilutes the network effect the others need: a friend graph built in MyM does nothing for Mash, making every Yahoo property weaker against networks where the graph travels freely.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, portal-era incumbents respond to the social-graph shift by proliferating overlapping products instead of consolidating around one asset — trading focus for optionality, and risking that none reaches critical mass.
- The deeper structural question is whether an incumbent's existing user base (e-mail) or a purpose-built new product is the right substrate for social networking — a fork in strategy that forces Yahoo to cannibalize one of its own bets eventually.
The trend: Portal-era incumbents facing the social-network shift are hedging with multiple overlapping social experiments rather than converging on a single platform, fragmenting their own audiences in the process.