The New York Times blog Bits reports on Inbox 2.0:
Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.
Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.
I don’t have a lot of detail from Google, but I’ve heard from several executives that this is their plan ...
Brad Garlinghouse, who runs the communication and community products for Yahoo, was a lot more forthcoming. He didn’t-have dates or specific product details either. But he did say that Yahoo was working on what he called “Inbox 2.0.”
...
This approach has a lot of potential and a few pitfalls. To start with, everyone who joins Facebook understands that what they do on the site is about sharing information with friends and sometimes strangers. People who use Yahoo Mail, or just exchange messages with someone using a Yahoo Mail account, have no such expectations. So the company will have to be very careful in how it explains what it is doing and ask for permission in the right places.
“This isn’t a separate product,” Mr. Garlinghouse said. “This is an integration that has to be seamless to the user.”
What’s more, running social networks is like starting nightclubs. You need music and beer, of course, and some hard-to describe magic that draws people to the club. Yahoo and Google are so big that the most they could aspire to would be to create the online equivalent of a crowded bar at a train station, rather than a club for a particular sort of person.
But since Yahoo and Google already have hundreds of millions of people visiting each month, it may well be that they can get a fair number to stop and chat.
Read more here. Mashable's Kristen Nicole is also somewhat concerned by the pitfalls of this approach:
Screwing with people’s existing schemas around email will ruffle a lot of feathers, require mind-altering concepts to be introduced, and a lot of people to question the driving motives. Not to mention options for preserving existing methods (to an extent), and permission for changing them in the first place. Would it feel like Yahoo’s spying on me if they know emails from Jenni are more important than that daily horoscope spam? Emails are extremely private sectors of our online life. One of the last spaces we can feel like we have privacy. I’m not entirely sure that Yahoo and Google should mess that up.
Read more here. Approaching this move from a slightly different perspective, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington goes even further with "Inbox 2.0 Makes Me Sad":
It makes me sad because it is absurd for Yahoo to keep launching new social networking products, almost monthly, without what appears to be any sort of high level strategic vision.
A few months ago it was Mash, followed by a quiet closure of Yahoo 360. Earlier this month they let loose a new college/alumni network experiment called Kickstart.
And now Inbox 2.0, but without any statement about integration with Mash or any other Yahoo properties.
I mean, I follow these products for a living, and I can’t keep their strategies straight. Or even figure out if there is a strategy. If Inbox 2.0 is part of Yahoo’s big vision for the future, then tell us more than the bits about the news feed and profile pages. Tell us how it can change the entire company, as OpenSocial appears poised to do with Google. And if it’s just an experiment, why screw around with one of your biggest assets.
Read more here.
