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Yahoo has gotten into the curious habit of releasing a preview version of a mobile app every six months at the CTIA mobility conference. This time around, it's OneConnect for iPhone and iPod Touch, an application that Yahoo hopes will showcase what it's calling its open mobile strategy. In layman's terms, OneConnect is an application that integrates your Yahoo IM account with your social networking accounts and also your iPhone contacts and camera.
(Credit:
Yahoo)
OneConnect is following the herd of any number of iPhone application developers offering to post status updates and messages to various social networks, including Flickr, MySpace, and Twitter. However, Yahoo's effort contains some useful features that, along with its established base of Messenger users, could gain it traction in the competitive world of popular iPhone applications.
I got a close look at OneConnect in a sit-down with Yahoo Mobile's communications crew that builds on my colleague Stephen Shankland's coverage of the keynote speech given by Yahoo's Marco Boerries, Executive Vice President of Connected Life.
In its preview form, the social application has three drives: updating photos and a status message to select social networks, sending free IM and SMS messages to contacts via an IP-based protocol, and souping up the device's address book to show the contact's Yahoo presence and stage interactions with them if they're online.
I'm reserving final judgment until OneConnect becomes available from the iTunes App Store, but based on the demo: so far, so good. Yahoo has rightly carried over from its PC-based Messenger and Yahoo Mail a communications feature that sends a text instead of an instant message when a contact is offline. The IM experience is richer than the SMS, of course, with emoticons and an area for quickly inserting URLs, but that's no detriment to the SMS capability. By hooking SMS to the Internet, Yahoo can offer its brand of texting free of charge to iPhone and iPod Touch users. That's a notable advantage to the latter group--since the iPod Touch is not a phone, those users wouldn't otherwise be able to send text messages at all.
Also promising is the favorites feature, a shortcut that lets you surface certain contact details in the application's contact list, like a buddy's cell phone number, so you can send a text or place a call with a tap. There are also a few cosmetic enhancements that add visual luster, but no functional advantage. When you turn to landscape mode from the messaging view, for instance, your avatar and your friends' avatar communicate via speech bubbles. You'll also be able to dress up a pal's avatar for use on your phone.
As a very early preview, Yahoo's OneConnect is off to a good start, and the iPhone platform has been a good choice for quickly and easily sharing Yahoo's vision of integration. While Yahoo's representatives dodged questions of a time line, it's likely we won't be seeing OneConnect in its full glory on other mobile platforms anytime soon.
We hope that we will see OneConnect add other instant messaging protocols, which would round it out as a full-featured social app. This is Yahoo's stated goal, but another dodge to the time line question and a lengthy explanation of Yahoo's difficulty in integrating Windows Live Messenger contacts into Yahoo's desktop messenger suggests that the addition of more networks could be a long time coming. If that's the case, Yahoo users may continue to use an all-in-one IM iPhone application such as Palringo to reach the sum of their friends, and use OneConnect for its other social updating features.
Updated at 3:50 p.m. PDT with further detail and information about Blueprint programming tools for mobile devices.
Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Yahoo Connected Life, speaks at the CTIA Wireless show in San Francisco.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News )SAN FRANCISCO--Yahoo on Wednesday released a preview version of a free new iPhone application called OneConnect that can centralize communications and social-networking activity.
"OneConnect allows everybody to keep connected to the persons they care about. It's a socially connected address book," said said Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Yahoo Connected Life, in a speech here at the CTIA Wireless show. "The address book now comes to life."
Yahoo is racing against Google and others to bring more applications to mobile devices in an effort to tap into the growth of mobile Internet use. Previous Yahoo applications such as OneSearch and Go compete against Google applications including Gmail, Search, and Maps.
One feature of OneConnect, called Pulse, "allows you to tap into everything going on with your friends," Boerries said. It pulls a news feed from "Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Last.fm--all the leading social networks--into one aggregated view."
A related "Favorites" feature lets people track or quickly contact the handful of people in a user's inner circle.
Another feature provides a unified hub of instant messaging, SMS messages, and e-mail.
OneConnect will be released in the U.S. initially, but "toward the end of the year will branch out to the rest of the world," Boerries said. Also coming will be versions for other phones. "The other ones will follow soon shortly," including BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile, and Nokia Series 60 phones, he said--but not for the Palm OS-based version of Treo phones.
OneConnect Pulse shows the activity of a user's social network.
(Credit: Yahoo)Google, meanwhile, had its own news. It announced a new version of its Mobile App for BlackBerry users. This software lets people search the Web, with a boost from search suggestions and previous search history, and get links to Google Docs stored online. The company already had an iPhone version of Google Mobile App.
Monetizing mobile
Why all this attention to mobile devices? Because Internet companies are looking for growth, and the mobile phone arena is one place where that growth is spreading now that networks can transfer data as well as handle voice calls. Yahoo expects to make money through sales of advertising, not service fees, Boerries said.
And mobile ads have personalization potential missing from those on computers, he said in an interview after his speech.
"We believe that because of the inherent personal nature of the mobile device," such as location information, "we should see significantly greater CPMs or CPCs," he said, referring to the cost per thousand impressions by which display ads are sold and the cost per click by which search ads are sold.
Blueprint's footprint
Yahoo also announced Wednesday it's increasing the profile of its Blueprint software foundation for developing mobile phone software. Blueprint consists of a "runtime" foundation tuned for each supported mobile device and software components programmers can use to build applications that run on that foundation.
Previously, Blueprint could only be used to develop "widget" applications that would run within the Yahoo Go mobile phone software. Now, though, it can be used to develop standalone applications that anyone can develop and distribute, Boerries said. Programmers wishing to do so can set their download sites so they transparently take advantage of Yahoo's back-end service to identify what phone a user has and to supply the appropriate Blueprint runtime, he added.
OneConnect lets users update Twitter, Facebook, and other sites with status messages.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Blueprint also works for developing software on an Apple iPhone--as long as you're a Yahoo programmer. "We are currently in discussions with Apple as to how we can work to make that available to other developers, but right now it's only used inside Yahoo," Boerries said.
The software is designed to ease the development difficulties of ensuring compatibility with hundreds of different devices.
"It's insane," Boerries said of the profusion of devices. "I do believe it'll be somewhat chaotic for the foreseeable future because of the size of the market. Blueprint hides that complexity."
Sun Microsystems, along with allies such as Motorola, has tried to accomplish much the same simplification through use of its Java software. Blueprint takes a different approach, though: instead of trying to provide interfaces that will make an application appear the same on every device, Blueprint tries to take advantage of what each phone can offer, so more sophisticated devices get more sophisticated options, he said.
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