Other than unsuccessfully bidding $1 billion to acquire Facebook and squandering photo service Flickr’s early lead, Yahoo hasn’t done much of substance in social networking. Maybe that will change, if recent comments by CEO Marissa Mayer are anything to go by.
“We need to have sharing built [in] as a fundamental component,” Mayer said at a Goldman Sachs investor conference, according to Bloomberg News. “One of the things that people really want to do is share their interests with their friends.”
Mayer also reportedly said she’d rather partner with Facebook than build new products. But you don’t have to build new products to make a splash in social networking; Mayer’s old employer Google made its mark with Google+, a social layer integrated with existing products like Gmail and Google search. It would be interesting to see what Yahoo could do with a similar approach.