Yahoo! is POUNDING MSN and Google when it comes to Time Per Person spent on property. (And AOL's clobbering Yahoo! on TPP, but this is a Yahoo! post dangit.)

To continue driving that number up and to maintain its Google-and-MSN-beating user base and reach, watch for Yahoo! to increase its investment in enabling social networks. Oh wait, Yahoo! announced that "On Wednesday, April 5th at 8 pm PDT, My Web 2.0 will be upgraded to introduce some exciting new features."

Yahoo also recently increased user ability to evaluate the posts left on its finance message boards, in what will likely look like a Digg deal where the most highly-rated posts float to the top. I couldn't find the boards in the wild. I looked somewhat hard.

Yahoo's slowly working backwards into what Nat at O'Reilly Radar described as his ideal social networking format. Here are his words in Social Network Analysis I Can Believe In:

"I know my friends through Perl, through OSCON, through talk.bizarre, through O'Reilly, through specific projects I did with them. We are asked to categorize our friends, which feels weird, but I wonder whether it'd make more sense if we were asked what object/place/occupation connects us to these people it would be better."

So what is the future of social networking likely to look like? One login, many networks, with an individual's profile altered for each network. Portable friend/family/buisiness groups likely built from email lists.

I'm in MySpace and LinkedIn. My profiles are DRASTICALLY different. As some of you may well be able to imagine. Why do I have to login to these sites differently?

Further, I think that the social networking killer app, will be the tools for users to create their own myspaces that can connect easily and fluidly and CONTROLABLY through this single interface. Oh yeah, and it has to be mobile and local too of course :).

Still to solve:
Online Ad Adjacency Not Always Advantageous
increasing diversity of social networks + no standards

From a Search Marketing perspective we HAVE to watch social networking and how it affects how people find the information they're looking for. Or rather, we have to start social network optimization companies ;)

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