Google and Yahoo! want to build a social network out of your email contacts.
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.
There is just too much effort to maintain your contacts across so many networks, and services like email and Twitter. It will truly be beneficial if they are stored in just one place, wherever it is. Using the email contacts will be a good way to pull people into social networking. But I sincerely hope they do not try to replace email with network messages. At least for me email is still not dead. In is still the most interoperable and has minimum constraints to start with and use.
The effort seems to be improve the social aspect of email as well as use the email contacts to improve the social network map. Will this work? It might be useful to pull in the uninitiated email users. But will it be effective? I am not very keen to start using it, but we will have to wait and see if there is a purpose to it.
