On Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Yahoo introduced a new mobile service called “oneConnect” which is designed to aggregate contacts and communications around what they refer to as a “socially connected address book.” oneConnect will be the first mobile product with open architecture to aggregate communication tools, including email, instant messaging, and social networks, and is expected to launch in Q2 2008 in Yahoo! Go 3.0 and Yahoo’s new mobile home page.
oneConnect is designed to bridge the gap between communication on mobile phones and online services, by providing:
- A widget interface with access to multiple common webmail service, including Yahoo’s own mail service and those of competitors like Gmail and Hotmail.
- Merging instant messaging and SMS text messaging across multiple networks into a single threaded interface (similiar to iChat).
- Recent updates from multiple social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, etc.) through a feature called “Pulse”.
- Address book contacts with more than basic information, including recent email, IM, SMS, conversations, and social networking updates.
In other words, communicating online with a mobile phone or mobile device has just gotten a hundred times easier, and you’ll be able to keep better track of your online communications while on the go.
oneConnect is an open platform and will include a programming interface for developers, who’ll be able to build their own services to use with the messaging system. Both the web and dedicated application versions of the service are expected to launch this Spring, which is just a few months away.
According to Yahoo, after its release, oneConnect is “expected to become available across hundreds of mobile devices and mobile browsers around the world.”
