As I have posted on before, the mobile social networking space is starting to take off. Now there is a new player who launched at the mobile world congress in Barcelona: GyPSii. They, as well as Tuurf and Zkout (two Swedish startups), are focusing on GPS-based social networking softwares for mobile devices. I’m still not convinced that I would use this, and the videocast of GyPSii below doesn’t convince me either.
Google launched yesterday an API for their index of current relationships that exists on the internet today, ie social graphs. The great move here by Google is that instead of just giving access to other social networks, they actually index the open standards that already exist today such as XHML Friends Network (XFN) and Friend of a Friend (FOAF). These standards are based on simple XHML markup that as microformats are integrated in the site as meta information which I think really is how the future will look. It will probably take pretty long before this hits big but it is definitely the right step towards Social Graph freedom and also a step towards the Semantic Web. See the video below of Brad Fitzpatrick explaining it all.
Recent news say, Microsoft has bid $44.6 billion to buy Yahoo in a combination of cash and stock.
This is quite a lot of money to say the least, but what would it mean for the market?
I really like Yahoo for their openness, and much dislike Microsoft for their closed nature. However, Microsoft have started to get a lot better these later years. Will this be their best move towards openness so far? If they keep Yahoo’s current strategy I think it is. But if they close it up, it will be very bad for the community.
Yahoo’s strategy seems to be: “If we provide good packages for free, cool stuff will happen”. This is very similar to google’s strategy, but it seems that Yahoo doesn’t have the cash flow to keep up with Google when buying cool ideas. Yahoo-Microsoft probably will if they work more towards openness and free.
What do you think?