Yahoo looks to link online world: Company’s oneConnect service to unify messaging

BARCELONA, Spain – Yahoo Inc. claimed it plans to reinvent mobile communications with oneConnect service, a mobile product with an open architecture that aggregates a user’s e-mail, instant messaging and text messaging, with what it calls a socially connected address book.
A key feature of the product is its open architecture, said Marco Boerries, executive VP of Connected Life at Yahoo. Any messaging service will be able to use Yahoo’s open API to plug into the messaging feature, whether the user prefers Yahoo Messanger, Google Inc.’s Talk, AOL’s Instant Messanger or MSN Messanger. The same is true for major e-mail services and social-networking applications.
“No one company can create this mobile ecosystem alone,” Boerries said during a press conference Tuesday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
A few of the innovative features of oneConnect are its Pulse feature, which lets users see what their friends are up to, including their status, profile updates and recommendations based on their social network pages, and Status, which lets users see their contacts by their most recent status updates on social networks, as well as update their own status on their social networks and automatically broadcast it to their friends.
In addition, the product users a combination of GPS, cellular triangulation and short-range wireless technologies like Bluetooth to offer a presence service so users can find their friends.
The company expects to roll out the service in the second quarter, making its money from advertising. If operators partner with Yahoo, it will share the advertising revenue with the partner.