Yahoo! Releases Beta Test Version Of Yahoo! Profiles – Social Networking

In an effort to further its new Open Strategy, Yahoo! released a beta test version of Yahoo Profiles! last Thursday.

Profiles is a control panel that allows users to manage all of their Yahoo activities and social connections and, according to Yahoo, the full version will also include management of interests, activities, and social connections across the Web.

“This new profile is not intended to be a new social destination on Yahoo,” Jim Stoneham, Yahoo’s vice president of communities, said in a recent blog post. “Rather, our plan is to integrate social as a central dimension into the services you use every day.

Yahoo is also testing a new home page that will allow users to track their friend’s actions across the web, and the latest versions of Yahoo Messenger allow users to see the Yahoo Buzz and Twitter updates of their friends as status messages.

“Ultimately,” Stoneham added, “our goal is to unify our social experience and connections not only on Yahoo, but anywhere you travel across the web.” 

Mobile Social Networking Poised For Prominence

Mobile social networking services sites, services on the rise.

Its official: social networking sites aren’t just for computers anymore.  Many major companies have made announcements in the past week that they are now or will soon be offering mobile social networking services.

One such company, Visto, unveiled a new service called Visto Mobile 6 which allows you to constantly check popular social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and others from your mobile phone to find out if any of your social networking friends have updated or changed their pages.

AT&T and Verizon have also announced new services. AT&T’s My Communites is a $2.99 per month service and Verizon’s SocialLife for $1.49 are both based on the Intercasting Corp Anthem social networking platform.  Yahoo has also developed a version of its oneConnect service that will allow people to monitor social networks using their Iphone or regular mobile phone.

So what’s next for social networking? If these new apps and services become as popular as most people predict they will, social networking may become the most valuable technology-based business communication method since email.  If so, look for every CEO of every major corporation to have a MySpace in the very near future.