In a fight to become the first point of contact when accessing the mobile web, Yahoo is set to launch yet another mobile service aimed at bringing together all the content user’s scour the web for into one centralized portal.
We reported on another service set to launch in Q2 2008 called OneConnect that searches the net and a user’s various social networking accounts to find contact details for their friends and incorporates that info into a user’s mobile address book to centralize communication. OnePlace, set to launch in Q2 as well, is a similar concept but aims at bringing together all the various content a user searches for and checks on into a central portal on the user’s device.
Using familiar bookmarking techniques and RSS feeds, the content you access often can be easily organized and dynamically updated without interaction from the user, providing a quick one-stop access point to the content you access often. Basically any type of content you access on a daily basis can be organized, updated, and accessible with one click. As per the onePlace website;
Because it’s based on a familiar bookmarking process, it will be easy to link practically any piece of content (news feeds, websites, videos, images, emails, search queries, etc.) into Yahoo! onePlace from anywhere across the Internet. It’s also designed to make it a snap to instantly link to all your favorite content that you’ve already personalized on Yahoo!—such as your My Yahoo! feeds, Flickr photos, stock portfolios, etc.—as well as from other popular websites including Digg®, YouTube®, Last.FM®, Facebook® and Google®.
Yahoo has been busy producing dynamic mobile applications and inking deals with mobile providers to become the first point of “mobile web” contact on mobile devices. Why you ask? Advertising. So far Yahoo has found it’s way onto 600 million mobile devices worldwide through it’s connections, but aims at being on 750 million by years end. In addition to OneConnect, and OnePlace, Yahoo has introduced OneSearch, and an iPhone-specific Yahoo portal to their arsenal of mobile applications.
Yahoo is trying to position itself as the starting point to accessing mobile content across all mobile devices. By doing this, they set the stage for themselves to reap the advertising revenue benefits. Marco Boerries, who’s leading Yahoo’s mobile drive, stated that there’s just to many different mobile platforms and technologies, and that until they’re somewhat centralized to one distinct platform, it’ll be difficult to access a broad user-base.
