For some time now I’ve known of Yahoo’s upcoming social network code-named Mingle. It got announced yesterday.

So here is my analysis of this new service - it looks really good.

1. Privacy

Mingle appears to go along with the trend towards more and more control over your particular stuff - who you’re friends with - and who you’re willing to share this information with. Tribe and other networks have this feature - and watch for it to become the ipso facto standard - which all others will be compared to.

2. Ease of use in inviting people in

Mingle apparently can suck in buddy lists from Yahoo Messenger. That’s totally coolio! I sure hope they make it easy for me to bring over my Yahoo Photos or integrate my links from MyYahoo.

3. MICRO-CONTENT formats supported

By far - the most interesting features Mingle has - is it’s support for various kinds of micro-content. This is something I’ve been predicting for a while now.

The natural way to delineate out and chop up all this end-user content - is to see it from a ‘micro-content’ POV. Notice this idea - as opposed to the burgeoning ‘lower case semantic web’ notion of microformats.

Micro-content is the notion that Reviews, Events, People, Lists, Media, etc. are what humans understand - and that many, many data silos have captured end-users content - to use it for themselves (Epinions comes to mind.)

So now imagine the opposite. Now imagine that Yahoo - in addition to hosuing all this end-user content - ALSO enabled folks ot easily contribute it to shared, public servers? That would be so COOLIO!

Open APIs and schemas is what will achieve this micro-content sharing. Registries of inter-connected servers can panout around the world - specializing in Malaysian restaurants or Parisian movie reviews.

Lists, media, events - it’s all possible. It’s all doable. It’s open source infrastructure.

I’ll be working hard to get Yahoo to support our burgeoning standards around the notion of shared Reviews, Media, Lists, Events, People, etc.

And we’ll be building all sorts of DLAs (digital lifestyle aggregators) to take advantage of these shared servers and open approach to end-user content.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 at 5:21 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.