Yahoo mobile
Yahoo! Announces oneConnect Social Address Book
Submitted by Mark Celsor on Tue, 2008-02-12 16:30. Mobile | Social Networking | Yahoo mobile 
I blogged on Friday about Social Network Consolidation and Google's Social Graph API. I feel that social network aggregation is going to be one of the big themes in 2008 and today Yahoo! threw it's hat into the ring with Marco Boerries' demo of it's oneConnect system at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. oneConnect is an address book system that pulls together information from social networking sites, email, instant messenger service and even GPS data to build a rich picture of what your friends are up to. oneConnect is build on the Yahoo! Mobile Developer Platform so it should work on most cell phones. They even did a demo on an iPhone showing integration with its native address book. It sounds like cool stuff and a great tool for stalking your friends.
IDG writer Peter Sayer has a more in-depth description of the demo in his article Yahoo Shows Off oneConnect Social Address Book on the New York Times site.
Yahoo! Mobile: Crazy cool and crazy scary
Submitted by Eddie Monge on Tue, 2008-01-08 13:15. phone | Yahoo mobileYahoo! just released a beta 3.0 of its Yahoo! Go mobile service. Version 2.0 gave you mobile access to your Yahoo email, calendar, contacts, news, maps, traffic and more. While 2.0 was ok (would have been great if I could use my slide out keyboard on my phone), 3.0 looks simply amazing. I am truly excited about 3.0. It's doing what Facebook Apps did for Facebook, but on something I use constantly, my cell phone.
My normal cellphone of choice is a Windows Mobile device so I am used to having real applications on my phone that are fully functional just like on my computer. But Yahoo! Go 3.0 will let me write apps for it in a simple-ish language and have the added benefit of being able to use it on my other cell phone line (don't ask, it's cheaper for me to have 2 cell phones and service then 1 so I go with it), or any cell phone that can support Go. There are so many uses that someone could come up with for this, but me, I am looking forward to finally being able to write a ledger for my accounts so I can track my spending. Call me new school but I never carry a checkbook around, or even a pen for that matter, so being able to enter this on my phone and have it update online would be really useful to me. It'll be interesting to see what others develop for it.
In the title I called Yahoo! mobile crazy cool and the last paragraph gave just a hint of how cool it could be, well now just a taste of how scary it can be. While not supported yet, Phase two of Yahoo!'s launch will try to make use of some of the phone's built-in features like location based services. This means the application will be able to locate where you are physically and update the service with that information so you can get usual facts like nearby restaurants. This sounds cool to, but combine it with the tracking and stats they plan to implement soon and then anyone, not just the CIA, will be able to track where you go. They can also track how long you stayed somewhere, what people you were close to (if they also have the program installed) and where they went. Of course, the thing that makes me feel better about this is that it *should* only work if you have the app running.
Overall, I am excited about this news but slightly worried. I may be a lot more worried when they roll out phase 2 but for now, I am going to go write a checkbook widget.
Read more about this at Yahoo! Mobile