After reading about the rumours of Yahoo!’s layoffs, I then came across a screenshot of the new Yahoo! profile page:

Look familiar? If you use Facebook or MySpace, you would be looked a red-tinted-logo mirror image.

By having a Yahoo! account, users can add friend connections from it’s address book and write updates about themselves known as Yahoo Buzz (their activity feed).

This is all that is initially planned, however, Jim Stoneham (VP of communities, Yahoo!) stated that this is the “foundation release” which will then enabled Yahoo! to develop on further.

The Yahoo Buzz activity feed will soon be a widget on the Yahoo! homepage for logged in users to see what’s happening within their social group.

But Yahoo! is looking to make this integration within various areas of its website – for example, if someone reviews a product on the Yahoo Shopping page, it will be added to their activity feed for the user’s friends to take a look at. The same is planned for sections like Finance, Sports, Flickr et al.

This sort of social community could increase user interactivity of Yahoo!’s products and services. Back in September Yahoo had opened access to it’s social API and Yahoo Application Platform for developers to write applications around this framework. Sounds like the following of Facebook, Apple and Google.

I guess Gigaom was right after all – Social Network is just a feature (http://gigaom.com/2007/02/05/are-social-networks-just-a-feature/)