Many of the MicroHoo conversations I had centered around the combined assets of Microsoft and Yahoo. What could the two companies, in combination, bring to bear upon the Internet landscape? And while the press largely liked to discuss the impact a Microsoft/Yahoo merger would have on the search market, to my mind that was not the biggest advantage of the combination. From where I sit, the greatest combined asset of Microsoft and Yahoo would be their vast social graph data. Farmed properly, MicroHoo could have enabled a stunningly powerful social network using nothing more than the fumes of their existing services.
To see the power of Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s social data, one need look no further than the first visit to virtually every social service. The first thing you are asked to do in the registration process is to give your login data for Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc. Why? Because each new social experience on the Web needs to recreate your social graph and the best way to jump start that process is to use the social graph data you already have stored in your existing communications services.
What if MicroHoo were to simply farm the social data contained in all of its current social services? Step one, implement a unified login across all MicroHoo services. I must say that this is one thing that Yahoo has gotten right from the very beginning (and Google has been a fast follower). Since its inception, Yahoo has viewed the customer experience as a unified one across all of its properties. And with each of its acquisitions, job number one has been to unify the login experience. Thus, Yahoo knows that “davidhornik” on Yahoo Mail is the same as “davidhornik” on Flickr is the same as “davidhornik” on MyYahoo. What if MicroHoo also knew that it was the same as “davidhornik” on Microsoft Messenger and as “davidhornik” on Hotmail? In fact, MicroHoo could know that I am the same “davidhornik” on:
etc.
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