Yahoo! Launches Major Challenge to Facebook Connect
Yahoo! Updates, the company's answer to Facebook Connect, became available on more than 600,000 websites today with the launch of a new partnership with commenting infrastructure company JS-Kit. Whereas Facebook's technology for tying profiles and activity updates between sites around the web has raised concerns about proprietary control over data, Yahoo! has implemented the open standard OAuth in its system.
By partnering with JS-Kit, a service that powers comments and ratings on sites big (like AOL and Sun Microsystems) and small (JS-Kit bought up old school market leader Haloscan in July), Yahoo! Updates is coming out of the gate in a big way. How does its technology compare to Facebook Connect?
The vision for all these kinds of systems is that allowing readers to authenticate themselves with a trusted 3rd party makes them more likely to post comments, offers exposure to site owners when comments are syndicated into activity streams on bigger sites and should allow site owners to access verified information about their readers' profiles and interests. That last part is still something we're waiting for, but that should be part of the value proposition to site owners.
Facebook Connect has been lauded for its usability; so much so that advocates of OpenID felt deeply threatened until Facebook teamed up to work with them on the OpenID user experience. In contrast, the Yahoo/JS-Kit user experience is immediately quite usable and full-featured. The same type of pop-up window asks users to grant permission to JS-Kit (or any other site using Yahoo! Updates) to access their Yahoo! profile information. There are a few extra boxes users have to click in order to grant that permission, but that's the extent of the complications. You can test the implementation on this page.
We're quite impressed with the technology and we're always appreciative of the way that Yahoo! supports open standards. It's not as if the company is accepting 3rd party OpenID login on Yahoo! sites yet, but all these other little steps are quite significant.
One thing that Yahoo! doesn't currently offer is syndication of off-site activities into Yahoo! properties. The company says that's coming soon.
In the coming months, as Updates are implemented across Yahoo!, publishers will enjoy referral traffic back to their sites from across the Yahoo! Network (more than 500M+ monthly unique visitors)...Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Toolbar, Profiles, etc.
If you thought Facebook represented the mainstream face of newsfeeds, 3rd party identity authentication, etc. just imagine what Yahoo! could do. The only question is whether the giant company will move fast enough - Facebook is very close to having stolen its thunder already. Yahoo! has been talking about "opening up" and integrating social data across its sites for months, Facebook tends to be much, much faster at taking action and innovating.
Facebook Connect is also available on JS-Kit supported pages, so it's not as if Yahoo! has surpassed Connect. We've asked Facebook for a precise number of pages that Connect is available on and are awaiting a reply. We do know that the company says that 6,000 developers have implemented Connect, but for all we know that number includes JS-Kit with its 600,000 sites as just one developer.
What do you think of the new JS-Kit/Yahoo! tie-in? Would you use it on sites where both it and Facebook Connect are an option? You can test Facebook Connect here on our site or both Connect and the new Yahoo! Updates commenting over on Guy Kawasaki's blog.
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I would use a new comment system if (and only if) it had advantages over and above the simple built-in system I already have. That means (1) sync with my own system so I can keep the comments if the provider does something I don't like, and (2) SEO. If they can drive traffic and get me a better ranking for my posts, I'm all over it.
Until any of these solutions can do both (not just one or the other), I'm sticking with my built-in solution that's been trustworthy for years.
@Nate
JS-Kit does both those things.
We invented the Sync feature back in the day. It imports and syncs your comments back to wordpress or blogger in real-time so u can turn off JS-Kit at any time.
We also have SEO support. Learn more about setting it up here: http://wiki.js-kit.com/Admin-Guide#SearchEngineOptimizationSEOSupport
Of course we *also* have OpenID, FB Conenct, Yahoo ID login, threaded comments, picture attachments, promotion of your content to a potential 600k sites through our visitor profile and more ;)
Looks very promising Spam protection, moderation control, facebook login, add photos, YouTube Video and sweet avatar that you can click to see all comments.
Exciting but i'm just beginning to incorporate Facebook connect into my sites and projects. Wondering how soon I have to add, if at all, Yahoo to that.
Posted by: David Bisset (sn)
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March 4, 2009 10:29 AM
Actually, Updates from 3rd-parties are live today on Yahoo! -- they're visible in our new social experience in Yahoo! Mail for millions users with access to that, as well as on Profiles, which is available to all Yahoo! users. Updates are also available from some sources in the Messenger client, and they can be accessed today via developer APIs as well.
Each of these footprints will be expanding to include more users and more sources soon, and we'll be making other large properties availablein the coming months.
not to say rah-rah, but JS-Kit will do both in one
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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March 4, 2009 10:29 AM
It definitely looks pretty interesting, and I'm wondering how/where Google's Friend Connect will fit into the conversation as well. I was at Google a couple weeks ago meeting with the social folks and it sounded as if what they were trying to do would be similar to this, but maybe I got the wrong impression. Either way, I think Facebook will enjoy some key advantages for awhile. For one, the trove of data that lives in a Facebook profile is generally more detailed (and organized) than what lives in a Yahoo or Google e-mail (or maybe that's just me personally). In addition, it does do a pretty good job of publishing stuff back into your Facebook feed. I use mapmyrun all the time and the integration between the two sites is pretty good even in this early iteration of Connect.
Still, this technology looks pretty cool. I plan to check it out.
In my view it's just another bunch of settings to keep track of and update. I just want stuff to work. How about I keep all of my data on my own site and Yahoo, Google, FB et al can come and grab it for theirs?
Posted by: Karoli
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March 4, 2009 10:32 AM
interesting perspective Karoli, makes sense to me!
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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March 4, 2009 10:32 AM
Yahoo keeps focusing on launching new tools, and although some of them are really good (pipes for example), for some reason they don't have a strong impact on the perception people has about the company...it is more like..."OK look at the kid who lost the battle trying to catch our attention with some juggling"
Can we get Y! Updates integrated into RWW's comment system? That would be great!
Yahoo has yet to built a cohesive social networking product. Facebook Connect is about so much more than cross-site authentication - it still maintains a huge advantage by integrating with Facebook profiles and activity feeds. Nothing Yahoo currently offers can truly compare.
I'm glad that Yahoo is getting into this market. I like their services, though they could improve their anti-spam filter in mail.
look at this, yahoo chasing facebook. This is only the beginning. Its only a matter of time until the facebook ads program is a million times bigger than whatever yahoo is calling their ad networks these days (panama, apt, rightmedia....)
im following the facebook ads program in detail over at adsonfacebook.wordpress.com - check it out and let me know what you think.
Why is it that everyone presumes that consumers want this facility. Why would a consumer want to centralize the risk represented by enabling a third party monitor their authentication to web sites??
Open Auth and other efforts are simply an attempt for business interests to get access to consumer data on the cheap.
The net of this is that your data is worth alot of money and all these sytems are attempting to divorce that value from you at no cost under the guise of "improved user experience"
Are we so naieve as to believe that there is not a selfish commercial interest behind these efforts?
If someone relly wants my opinion - pay me for it.
On the one hand, very much ditto frank. On the other hand: Given FB's recent trust issues and Y!'s greater trustworthiness (in my experience, which may differ from yours, I admit) I'm willing to give Y! a chance.
yahoo surely have great services just they just need to improve alot on their anti-spam system in yahoo mail
As much as Facebook, Google and Yahoo! fight it out for the single sign-on popularity, I hope eventually the user will be the victor.
Marshall asked in another post 'Will the OpenID community lose out to the company's proprietary system or will this challenge breathe new life into the movement for open source, standards based, federated user identity?'
As he suggests here in the possibility of site owners being able to access verified profile and attention data, presumably leveraged to serve more relevant content to the user (and even pointing to the ease of the sign-on compelling users to contribute) hopefully this will result in high quality user-enriched data - the benefits of which will be community-wide, rather than only the advantages felt by the single user of whichever proprietary platform they chose to contribute with.
http://hibbins.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/three/
nice work. Yahoo!
@Chris Saad
I have a blog I started years ago that is not on blogger or wordpress. I'd like to outsource the comments. If understand JS-Kit correctly, I can do that. Does JS-Kit allow for anonymous comments? Is it a free service?
Thanks, Joe.
Until any of these solutions can do both (not just one or the other), I'm sticking with my built-in solution that's been trustworthy for years.
I've not looked into this depth, but it sounds more like Google Friend Connect in functionality than it does Facebook Connect. So, it will work well for static sites with no user participaton at all, but complicates things for sites that already support logins and commenting, as the two systems can't be synchronised.
Anyone wondering how they'll support this, Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect and other OpenID implementations should take a look at JanRain's RPX.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
I choose facebook for accessible social media marketing. It really works and drive prospect costumer! Thanks for this post!
Yahoo should either acquire facebook because it is not going to loose its curent customer base
Weight Loss
its very good thing and lanuching
There are some PHP based Comments Script (GentleSource, AdrianTNT) that work well. You include your PHP with a unique page tag which brings up all the related comments. It is not sophisticated, but SEO it does and very inexpensive. Really, all I want is the ability to reply to comments and have those comments tabbed to the right. Disqus and JS-KIT does this well, but all their efforts are towards blogs and I don't want that. At the same time, there's really not financial incentive for any of these companies to do what I want.
wow, Genious!
Yahoo is now ready to give challenge to google with it's new updates, it's true that google search is still favorite of mass but it is difficult for a SEO to bring his site on yahoo search in short term.Thanks for nice postings.
Good news...having numerous platforms to update status will keep friends closer...so anyone who's just into that...hurray. But the negative part is that people may tend to be careless (sharing without a thought). That alone may land people in hot soup.