Earlier this morning, both AOL and Yahoo! announced plans to offer a twitter/facebook status-type life-streaming service to integrate with its other product offerings.
Dubbed “Updates” and “Site Social,” respectively, Yahoo! and AOL intend to integrate with its email and instant messaging client, (respectively again).
Disruptive? Highly unlikely. Although there is a slight potential for success, considering the number of people using Yahoo’s email service or AOL’s AIM service, it’s almost like seeing Ric Flair in the ring or Pamela Anderson strutting down the catwalk – it’s kind of cool, but at the same time, it’s not. There’s no hype around it, and someone else clearly does it better (look and functionality), and so the novelty wears off. *shudder*
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Much like a restaurant that has a menu that is 10 pages thick, people know where the real good shit is – places that offer a limited menu, but you know everything is done well.
To give you an idea of what could be the outcome of these features, consider the fact that AIM had its own buddy feeds back in 2006, and they were not able to capitalize. AOL acquired Bebo, which already has life-streaming technology. Next is “Site Social.” Yahoo! has MyBlogLog (credit to coxy), with “Updates” coming in the next few months. They’re creating duplicate services, burning resources that will have no added value, and the products will actually cannabilize one another.
Both companies don’t really seem to understand how things should be done, or at least IMHO. Think of the next step after life-streaming, rather than just imitating those who are just plain better at executing.
