They have del.icio.us, they have Flickr, they have Webjay and most recently, they have SearchFox. What does this mean for Yahoo? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it. Yahoo!’s got these and they have to do something with them. I’m thinking of maybe a….social-bookmarking, social photo-sharing, personalised news-aggregating, social music-listening app [observation: the only thing 'social' they don't have is an RSS reader. Obviously.].
I don’t have any inside information from Yahoo! on this, but it is one of my large predictions. They haven’t done anything with any of these apps as of this writing and it’s clear that they must be thinking of doing something with them. Why would some company acquire something and not do anything with them? Let’s look at the style of acquisitions each of these Web 2.0 buyers have showed so far [observation: each has a different way]:
- Google [Urchin, Keyhole]: Close down product. Hire people in company. Come back few months later with killer-app and make it free.
- AOL [Truveo, Weblogs Inc]: Plan everything. Acquire. Keep app open, however, integrate into own system straight-away unless specified otherwise.
- Yahoo! [del.icio.us, Flickr, Webjay, Oddpost, SearchFox]: Acquire. Keep app open. Oddpost = exception.
- AskJeeves [Bloglines]: Acquire. Keep app open.
- Ebay [Skype]: Acquire very un-related product to self. Keep app open. Leave it alone.
- LookSmart [Furl]: Acquire product. Keep open, however desperately try to integrate to self.
- Verisign [Weblogs.com, Moreover]: Keep app fully open. Replace copyright footer/logo under-text. Integrate.
This is definitely interesting. More than 50% of the companies as you see have at least tried to integrate the product, while Yahoo! (Oddpost definitely an exception) has just kept still. It’ll not only be interesting from now on, but I hope breaking news.
For a great laugh, check out the Technorati tags for this post. I think I’ve listed every million-dollar-making ‘Web 2.0′ company in the planet. 
