Opportunities 2006 - Integration

2006 is going to be a year where the creators of web technology have the opportunity to make their services better in terms of integration, usability, and usefulness.                - Ken Yarmosh, next version of Yahoo! Mail (not yet available to the public), complete with an integrated feed reader. Then consider two key 2005 acquisitions - social bookmarking kingpin del.icio.us and photo sharing Flickr, their Yahoo! 360 initiative, and the industry leading Yahoo! Groups - it doesn't take too much to see that Yahoo! has the opportunity to seamlessly tie together some very popular services for their users. Yahoo! is quickly pushing towards integration. Take a look at vertical service offering. To achieve widespread adoption, however, providers must bring these technologies to their users; they must integrate them into favorite online hang-outs. That means that the big dogs - Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft - have an advantage because of their huge user base, as well as their flourishing sites and services. From this perspective, sites like MySpace have the opportunity to become even more powerful. unaware they consume RSS feeds - that's a good thing. 2006 will bring the opportunity to do more of the same. Stay tuned for the next opportunity - usability. TECHNOSIGHT blog.