Full Circle Associates

Yahoo buys del.icio.us! I'm not surprised and it puts another lego into the construction I'm seeing assembled. I say lego, because this is all remixable. Think about it. There is probably no other community tool that has been around and used as much as Yahoogroups. Yet for years, it was a poor stepchild in the Yahoo universe. But as I've blogged before, that has been changing. The addition of Flickr, Yahoo360, the new RSS element of the beta email product. Adding del.icio.us is a perfect fit. del.icio.us: y.ah.oo!:

"We're proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we'll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We're excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We're also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

The flikr twin bit is important here. There is a common DNA. The idea of easily assembled and remixed pieces, tied to the identity of a member. Keep that in mind. OK, lets take it a step further.

Imagine you are a distributed community of practice. You have been using Yahoogroups as your main communications platform for the last 7 or 8 years - and before one of the products that Yahoo bought and folded into groups. You have put up with the ads and the vagaries for years. It was free and scalable. It worked. Some of your members got their group mail in private yahoo mail so their membership was portable as they moved across jobs. Yahoo IM supported real time, one to one interaction and "backchannel" (which, by the way, is not limited to conferences!).

Now some of your members have flickr feeds. When the group meets F2F, all the photos have a flickr tag. You are using someone else's wiki for notetaking, because there is no YahooWiki!

Some of the member have blogs on Yahoo 360. Some are aggregating their YahooGroup content on 360, some on MyYahoo. What better addition than a social tagging/bookmarking element like delicious. Aggregate all the members' tags, right into 360 or MyYahoo. It is getting really interesting...

Now all we need is something to weave it together. del.icio.us is part of the thread. With MyYahoo is another -- imagine all these things coming tgether for your individual view. But what is the community view? How do I see all the delicious tags or flickr pictures of everyone in my community of practice? How do I search just across that group's tools (list, files, tags, pictures, blogs)? How do I manage my participation in this group? In the 5 groups I belong to? How can I mix and remix the elements across my groups to balance volume, reputation, relevancy and my own privacy and identity.

The pieces are there. The thread to hold it together is what I'm looking for next. Will Yahoo do it? Will Google, who is similarly positioning products, do it? Microsoft?

Just a hint to all of you. One of your biggest assets is all of us who run/moderate/facilitate groups online. We are your gateways (gateway drug??LOL) to this world. Communicate with us. Ask us what we observe and want.

Categories: flickr, delicious, yahoo, myyahoo, yahoo360, communitiesofpractice, community_indicators, onlinecommunity