3GSM: Yahoo! One Connect - the Ultimate Community Tool for Mobile

It’s amazing how Yahoo! seems to be constantly under the spotlights lately. After resisting Microsoft’s offer, the guys from Sunnyvale decided to counter attack with an announcement that should the very core of the Mobile World Congress.

One platform for all communities

Marco Boerries, Vice President of the firm’s Connected Life division, was in charge of presenting the new service called One Connect. Easily installed on a large majority of phones being sold today, it centralizes all your communities under one platform. Starting with your contacts, whether they are in a webmail, or in MSN, AIM, Facebook or Myspace, they will all be grouped within one superset. It’ll then be possible to know who’s online and who isn’t, what is the status of your communication and even archive past communications.

Beyond Facebook

Keeping the same idea, One Connect will manage all kinds of message from SMS to MMS, including mail and instant messaging and the user will be able to choose what method of communication he wants to use based on the recipient’s status. Similarly, the user will be able to be alerted of anything happening on a community, since the Yahoo! platform sends an alert in case of a change of status in Facebook or when one of your contact uploads a picture on his Flickr account.

Geo tagging your contacts in real time

Based on mobile widgets, One Connect allows you to search your contacts according the distance that separates you and them. Finally, Marco Boerries was happy to announce that a version made for the iPhone (his favorite phone), with a specific interface for Apple, will be available. The new service from Yahoo! is expected for spring 2008.