Yahoo continues to search for its niche in the ever-evolving Internet space. And with a restructured leadership team, Yahoo has announced Y Connect, a similar social media offering to Facebook Connect, which allows users to log-in to a variety of other sites using their Yahoo account.
Now, Yahoo partner sites will automatically buy-in to this new venture. But, I wonder whether other major sites will jump on the bandwagon? Because the whole benefit of Facebook connect is that everyone already has a Facebook account. To start using Y Connect, many people will have to, for the first time, sign up for a Yahoo account.
And for those people, what’s the point? Now, for current users, they will be able to “like” content and easily share it with their Yahoo contacts, so they will likely welcome this addition.
Yahoo joins Twitter, Facebook and Google as the major players who now have this auto-connect service. Now, Google makes sense because of how big they are. Facebook makes sense because everyone has a Facebook account. Twitter makes sense because its entire application relies on sharing.
Yahoo’s entry in this field kind of feels like it wants to included in this next evolution of Web without actually earning it. But, to be fair, Yahoo understands that, and is offering participating websites detailed information incentives regarding their traffic in order to convince them to participate. We’ll see if it’s enough.