Yahoo intros OneConnect for cell phones

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: The last thing the world needs is another social network that lets users chatter on and on with their friends, the head of Yahoo Inc's mobile Internet business said in an interview.

What users need is a way to keep track of all of them.

"Today, most people have too many forms of communications," Marco Boerries, senior vice president of Yahoo's Connected Life unit, told Reuters.

"To keep in touch with all of them you have to go to all of these different Web sites," he said.

Yahoo said on Tuesday it is introducing a new tool called oneConnect that fits snippets of the Web's most popular services -- from Yahoo and rivals such as Microsoft Corp, Google Inc or Facebook -- onto small cell phone screens.

OneConnect unifies a user's personal contacts in a single place, the phone, and demonstrates the progress Yahoo has made in entering the fast-emerging mobile Internet market while it struggles to overcome repeated setbacks against Google in Web search and advertising.

Boerries said major phone carriers worldwide have agreed to use oneConnect to send e-mail, instant messages, photo sharing and social network site updates to hundreds of millions of mobile customers.

"This is about reinventing mobile communications," he said ahead of the Mobile World Congress, a major annual industry fair now going on in Barcelona.

 "I get a complete view of what's going on in my world."
OneConnect will be made available in the second quarter.

Versions of the service can run on a majority of mass-market mobile phones, and Yahoo said it will create special versions to work on Apple Inc's iPhone and Research in Motion Ltd's Blackberry.

Open to any other web service

OneConnect is part of a strategy to open up Yahoo services to work side by side with those of rival services, thereby making itself a more relevant starting point for users seeking to find what's going on the Web.

It lets users move back and forth between different modes of conversation on the same small mobile phone screen: a user might text message a friend, then switch to an instant message service both friends use to hold a longer conversation without incurring per-message charges.

The oneConnect software automatically goes out to the Web to find contact details of friends in services such as News Corp's MySpace, AIM, Bebo, Xing, Friendster or Orkut and merges them into the user's mobile phone address book.

Yahoo gives users control over how much privacy they want and the default setting is "invisible" -- meaning no one knows what the user is doing.

The service takes advantage of a fast-growing trend among heavy Web users in which users share short messages over the Web that can be read only by selected friends, or broadcasted publicly to meet like-minded people.

Services such as Twitter and Facebook have popularized so-called "status-casting" -- quick messages individuals publish to Web sites like "I'm busy" or "headed to the pub" or "watching the news and it's depressing."

OneConnect can broadcast the same status message to multiple networks.

Yahoo also offers advanced location features that allow users to detect any of their friends who choose to broadcast their location, whether by neighborhood or city -- or just across the room.

"Because everything is now connected through your mobile address book you can now do some really cool things," he said.