I wondered how Google will directly benefit from the OpenSocial API a few days ago, particularly as more bloggers believe it to be a whole lot of hot air, and now it looks like Yahoo is answering.

That is, on a day that its stock is tanking {down 7%} perhaps because of how Jerry Yang is in the unenviable position of defending his company in Congress for a thing that happened years before he assumed the CEO-ship, Yahoo is securing mobile advertising deals.

Now, call me a crude simpleton but it looks like these kinds of maneuverings are *exactly* what will pad Yahoo’s bottom line.

Reuters has the low-down which involves Yahoo’s mobile chief racing to get Yahoo’s ads in front of hundreds of millions of mobile customers before Google’s android ever sees the light of day — which is scheduled to be the latter half of 2008, practically an eternity in geek-years.

In fact the breadth of these deals seem to be pretty … well, global.

Yahoo already has deals to feature a package of services like search, e-mail and mapping on limited handsets from major phone makers, including Nokia, Motorola, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and HTC — every top name except Sony Ericsson.

Carrier partners include Vodafone in Britain and Hutchison Whampoa’s 3 across Europe, and a recent far-reaching deal Web search and advertising deal with Spain’s Telefonica that covers 100 million users in several European countries and much of the Latin American region.

Yahoo has also signed advertising deals with six operators across Southeast Asia and India. North Asia is next.

It has been in talks with operators in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Malaysia -- markets that boast some of the highest mobile penetration rates — for new service tie-ups, President Susan Decker said on a tour of Asia last month.

[emphasis mine]

Furthermore, there’s nothing to stop Yahoo from using the Android platform to help deploy its ads and ‘mobilize’ these ad deals that were made 18 months before Android ever ships out.

“If ‘Android’ is truly open source, we can take everything out there,” Boerries said of the outside possibility Yahoo might use Google phone software and run Yahoo services over the devices. “Nothing prevents me from taking it,” he said.

Deliciously Machiavellian, and simple too.  Google pwns my life as much as the next geek, but I also have a soft spot for the underdog, which Yahoo! clearly is.  In this case, and in this instance (not like how Yahoo folded like a cheap suit for the Chinese government), they’ll get my vote FTW.

Duncan Riley reports that Alibaba has had the typical — or perhaps, more than typical — run up of a hotly expected internet IPO, with its stock price shooting up around 160% of its initial offering.

The big obvious winner is Yahoo, who controls a controlling 40% stake in the parent group of this Chinese enterprise-level e-commerce/trade website, and has made, on paper, over a $1B in the first day alone.

While its a day of financial windfalls for Yahoo in China, its also a day, ironically, that will find its CEO, Jerry Yang, in the Congressional hotseat to answer questions *about* how Yahoo deals with China — specifically, how it gave confidential information to Chinese government officials about a local dissident, leading to that individual to serving 10 or more years in jail.

The financial windfall will score, undoubtedly, the incredible opportunity in China for any net companies; and yet, I think its all the more important that any new media watcher to follow what is said in these Congressional hearings.  BusinessWeek has the details, but the fallout from Yahoo’s shennanigans (if the release of information leading someone to end up in jail can be glibly called a “shennanigan”) may be some interesting US legislation which follows that may make it illegal *in* the US to divulge such private information, which may include phone numbers and social security numbers, to any third party (governments included).

I don’t know how the lobbyists will deal with that kind of impending fight, but should it pass — as BusinessWeek rightly points out — it may make it all but impossible for US based companies to do work in China; even Yahoo, who has a controlling interest in Alibaba (according to the BusinessWeek article), has these issues to contend with as the local CEO has publicly proclaimed that he’ll work with the Chinese government with whatever it needs to do.

Thanks to a kind invite by Sam Harrelson (via cost per news), I am now in Mash doing … uh, Mashy-type things.

Its quite a lot like Facebook, with a few subtle differences, such as the ability to move around and potentially play with *other* “friends” profiles.  Another interesting thing is that you have some control over how your profile appears, something that’s quite standardized in Facebook.  Its almost MySpace-y, to be honest.

My own profile is over here: http://mash.yahoo.com/tony_hung100

If you’re interested in trying it out (and being my “friend” — wow, did that sound sad or what?) leave a comment with your real email address (because its needed for me to set it up) and I’ll get around to adding a profile for you (i.e. “sending you an invite”) as soon as I can.

Yahoo has released its social network “Mash” into beta, with a limited number of invites circulating around your favourite social networking sites.  I’ve yet to actually play with it myself (not deigned to being big or influential enough to get any advance shares sadly), but I can already tell you that the advance press (from said blogs) is no different than what I would say:

It looks like “Yet Another” Social Networking site.

Its funny that way, I guess.  When you’re amongst the first businesses to define an entirely new category of anything, your name becomes synonymous with that category.  Classic examples of course are Kleenex (for paper tissues) and Xeroxing (photocopying).  The social media scene is no different, except its tinged by a dash of geekish I told-you-so pathos.

Take the example of Digg — it was the first biggest and most successful social news site, and in doing so, grew and defined an entirely new category of online news.  Every site that comes after has been thought of as a “Digg clone”, although the pejorative is nothing more than a short-hand of saying that “we have a news site that has voting of headlines — like what Digg did”.

Facebook and Myspace? Same thing.

And the bigger the parent “copier”, the bigger the crowing of “this is just like –” and “wait, isn’t this just a clone of — ” … ?  And what about when that parent is a Web 1.0 property to bloggers love to hate for being so clumsy and slow for integrating their new social media purchases?

Bingo.

Yahoo suffers this perceptual double whammy — amongst social media adopters, anyway — and I suspect, at least a double whammy — in a different way — amongst anyone who has ever used Facebook before. 

Has anyone considered, for example, how many of Yahoo’s own users are *also* Facebook or MySpace users?

Feature parity (the same kinds of features that are on every other site, such as internal messaging, friending, public boards, widgets, customizability, and so on) is probably the entry price for playing amongst other social players, but Yahoo has two giant hills to climb in this regard (the double whammy for regular users).

1. Making it a substantially better experience: And this refers to the “Yet-Another-itis” jab.  Fine.  Let it be in beta. But amongst the new features that will come out (and there had better be some), its got to better and more innovative than the competition.  I have no idea what these will be, but you really have to give people a reason to settle into a new network — or, if they’re planning to integrate it, for example, for people with the same Yahoo ID (an obvious move) — you have to give them a reason to stop spending time in one place for another.  Which leads me to …

2. Fighting lock in: The great advantage that Yahoo has is that there are millions of people already using its existing service in all kinds of ways.  A social network has the potential to tie that altogether — but, when you’re fighting for early adopters and evangelizers of your service you can bet that a ton of them (all of them?) might already be on *another* social network, where all *their* friends are.  In many respects this *is* a zero sum game, where I suspect many people don’t have time for two more more social networks *especially* if this is true for casual folk who make the bulk of social network users.

It remains to be seen what Yahoo does with its Mash property, and whether, for example, this is a part of the Yahoo! network that the higher ups are content to be “good enough” to compete, but not beat the competition with.

I’ve been guilty in the past as any other blogger about kicking Yahoo about its obvious problems, but it seems like Yahoo does have an opportunity here.  How it contends with some of these difficulties remains to be seen.

So you may have heard that Yahoo! snapped up BuzzTracker, a rather small potato in a field of news/blog aggregators, for a cool $5 million dollars. The details can be found courtesy of Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.com over here.

Like Mat Ingram, I haven’t paid anything but a cursory look at BuzzTracker because it just doesn’t serve me as well as other meme trackers, namely Techmeme. Furthermore, its layout isn’t as dense (or concise, if you will), leading to pages and pages of endless scrolling. And that’s besides the comment spam that’s left behind some well-meaning (or not) BuzzTracker employees/evangelists/new media graffiti artists.

What *is* kind of interesting, however, is the announcement that Buzztracker *will* introduce one thing that other meme/news trackers *don’t* have. Yeah, I’m talking about Techmeme, Megite, Tailrank, (but not my new favourite news aggregator, see my next post).

And that’s a layer of discussion and community right over the daily topics.

I think this is a very good — and smart — thing for BuzzTracker, because it will allow BuzzTracker to directly host conversations, rather than, for example, readers being ‘forced’ to leave comments on respective blogs. Because, let’s face it — not everyone blogs.

By doing this, it can actively cultivate and “own” a proper community of readers in a way that none of the other news aggregators are actively doing.

Furthermore, it makes total sense when you consider what kind of jolt it will get just by being part of the Yahoo! family — and that readers from Yahoo! will precisely be the kind of people who might participate on news topics. Casual ones, without necessarily wanting to read blogs, or, who might not own a blog.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, it will have the benefit of getting the trickle down traffic from the parent company to power these conversations.  Because let’s face it — having no discussions when its an offered feature is probably worse than having no discussion feature at all.

So, Bear Stearns, the investment banking and hedge goliath who can’t seem to get sub-prime mortgages right – whose two hedge funds declared bankruptcy in the midst of some of the steepest drops in the stock market memory — is now declaring itself a guru in social marketing. To be fair, Bear Stearns is a large entity, with competing interests and different individuals, but the comparison was too delicious to avoid.

Nevertheless, as Mike Arrington reports and Bear Stearns hath declared: “Yahoo Must Get Its Social Networking Shit Together.”

What follows is an argument that Yahoo should “get into” the social networking scene by buying Facebook, which follows with some interesting math valuing Facebook at around 5-6 billion sollars.

Now, the glib response (and being no stranger to glib responses, I will give one … now) would be that Yahoo already has Flickr, MyBlogLog, Yahoo 360, Del.icio.us, and 32 other social networking, or socially-related networking technologies (well, perhaps less than 32). They should just get their shit together and knit what they already have into a social networking strategy. Even better: Just remake Yahoo into one giant social networking site.

The problem is — and what makes this a glib response — that it doesn’t recognize a couple things.

First of all, at a place like Yahoo there is probably an enormous amount of corporate inertia to do risky things. Taking what seems like disparate entities with their own departments, and getting them to “come together” under a single umbrella would probably take more guts than any one person — such as their CEO, Jerry Yang, has. Yes, I’m sorry to flog the “Jerry Yang is teh suck” message, but I still can’t believe any one is excited about a vision that is predicated on such vagaries as “speed, clarity and discipline“. That’s like saying my vision is predicated upon being “awesome”, or being “excellent”. But I digress.

Getting Yahoo to actually create a coherent social networking strategy is needed, sure. But actually getting it done is an entirely different matter.

Secondly, it doesn’t recognize a fundamental difference between people who use Facebook and people who use Yahoo — and I’m not talking about demographics (necessarily). Rather, people who use Facebook *know* about social networking, or are curious enough about it to want to know about it. Facebook *IS* a social networking site, and to remind ourselves of one thing — social networking is more than just “members”, which Yahoo already has a lot of already. Social networking is members having a sense of ownership of their identity on a particular service, as well as actively reading, commenting on, updating, and above all interacting with other members.

The folks who use Yahoo right now are from a greater and more diverse cross section of web users, some of whom don’t necessarily “get” social networking, particularly as I have described it above, and others who don’t even want that from Yahoo. I’m talking about people who are using it exclusively for things like news, email, or even classifieds.

Even if you retool everything so that it becomes like Facebook, the problem is that you would need to make it more than okay and acceptable to the Yahoo faithful (if such a word could be applied to them). They would need to embrace it and *love* it, and to affect that kind change in attitude quickly is more than difficult. Its impossible.

So, let’s get back to the Bear Stearns remark, because it actually may have some merit when taken from a user-point of view. Yes, there is money in the Facebook brand and all its tools. But by purchasing Facebook “in toto”, it would also be purchasing its 30 million plus users, who could be cross-pollinated amongst its other social networking properties. By buying Facebook’s users, not only would it give Yahoo instant credibility, it would also be buying *users* would are used to and amenable to, social networking activities.  It would make it *easier* for them to implement an integrated social networking strategy because they would have bought an install base upon which to base it on, and build upon.

Now, the fact that it hasn’t *yet* done so, even after purchases of entities like Geocities (way, way, way back, pre bubble 1.0) all the way up to MyBlogLog makes me less inclined that its able to an integrated anything.  Which leads me back to my original position.

Should Yahoo buy Facebook?  I think it would be a great fit for Yahoo — and it would be even greater yet, if it had the will to do something with it and its other social media properties, and create something out of Yahoo! that is greater than any of its socially-related parts.  In an age where Google seems to be spreading its tentacles farther, wider, and deeper (and more offline) than ever before, Yahoo! needs to live up to its online legacy so that it represents something more than a mishmash of seemingly unrelated web (never mind “social”) properies.

Ok — my ranting’s done. Left-sided brain thinking now. Yahoo! SmartAds looks like an interesting product. If you’re looking for the three sentence description, here it is: SmartAds is a form of behavioural marketing. Yahoo! is able to monitor what you do and what you search for, and then serves up ads *not* necessarily based on what you’re seeing at the time, but based on what you recently searched for. If you looked for vacations, then you might see ads for vacations.

The contrast is with contextually based advertising, which Google does in its sleep with the Adsense program. What contextually based advertising does is serve ads based on the content of the site that you’re on right now — not based on what you were looking at or surfing for previously.

Now, the press release is pitifully devoid of many details, such as, but not limited to how it actually does this. My puny brain, however, suspects that it involves cookies somehow. That is, on partner sites, or even on Yahoo! itself (in its giant network), it places a cookie that leaves tracks as to where you’ve been. It might be that those cookies have also some kind of semantic meaning / data attached to it as well. For instance, “Amazon.com” has to mean “books” somewhere — whether it does that on the back end or on the cookie is not known.

Having said that, there are three questions that Yahoo! SmartAds has yet to answer (even as its not widely available — but what the heck).

1. What about cookie blockers? I don’t know if this is the only way that its able to track behaviour, but if it is one of the most important ones, this could be a bit of a hangup when you consider that most internet savvy people might have some form of cookie-blocking behaviour on — and secondly, on some settings in some browsers, it may be on by default. If you can’t use cookies, your ability to track behaviour might be compromised.

2. What about multiple users on a single computer? Even on PC’s that are using cookies, how will SmartAds distinguish between different users? If I search for Transformers yesterday, will my wife be seeing ads for Transformer posters when she’s looking for baby clothes? Or vice versa? I expect that the clickthrough and conversion rate *might* be affected with that.

3. Did you know the perception is that contextual advertising’s more effective? Well, last year in a study that was conducted by Outsell, that’s what most marketing executives thought anyway. Yes, its 2007, and no I have no data on how Yahoo’s SmartAds do today compared to yesterday, but the *perception* anyway, is that contextual advertising — what Google does — is actually more effective. And heck, whe you think about problems with cookies, you might understand why.

Ultimately real acid test will be when SmartAds is released to the wild, and what kind of results people get with it. And what Google does in response to it. After all, sure, Google has its tentacles in all kinds of pies, but you would hallucinating something fierce if you *don’t* think that Google is looking into behavioural advertising of some kind (I think its just a matter of time).

And then of course, the question will not be who is doing what — but who is doing it the best. And perhaps, who is *integrating* contextual advertising and behavioural marketing the best.

But I guess that’s a question for 2008 — unless Google surprises us next week.