Yahoo Social Networks Hosted on ZooomrGigaOM — Yahoo goes on a startup shopping binge GigaOm (along with quite a few other people) has a post out today about the three acquisitions announced by Yahoo! today. First thing this morning Yahoo! said they were acquiring Bix, then MyBlogLog and then Kenet Works. Whew! What a day.
At least two of these offerings, Bix and MyBlogLog, are in the social networking space and would be potential tools to continue to beef up Yahoo’s social networking platform which also includes Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming and WebJay.
Of course the 900 million pound Gorilla Facebook has still remained an ellusive catch for Yahoo! Digg, who purportedly wants at least $160 million has also remained at large. My only acquisition prediction last year was that Yahoo! would buy Digg, but they should have done it last year when the price likely would have been cheaper than the minimum rumored $160 million plus price tag today.
It’s interesting to see Yahoo continue their committment to the social networking world. I think that over time it is their social network that gives Yahoo! the biggest chance to gain ground in search of all. For more on Bix’s features check out Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz’s post that he wrote on the company today here.
Another interesting acquisition play for Yahoo! could be CNET where they could acquire in bulk a bunch more interesting social networking plays.
Update: Maybe MyBlogLog isn’t being bought by Yahoo! after all.
Well, I’m not so sure it can be considered an “empire” when they aren’t even on the map in terms of usage.
Anonymous 20 million monthly uniques on Flickr is not something to sneeze at. Certainly they don’t have anything the size of YouTube, MySpace or Facebook yet but the more of these small little social networks that they buy the more interesting things they may be able to do which together can drive traffic over time.
The challenge for Yahoo remains how best to integrate their various social media properties with each other and an even more daunting task how to integrate them with search. Flickr has already begun limited integration with delicious and upcoming and I’d suspect that you see much more of this in the future.