Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer continued her “panic” shopping
spree and takes on the "webmail" war with the acquisition of Xobni. /https://www.xobni.com/
Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards) is an email startup based
in San Francisco that offers products designed to help users build/uncover
information about the contacts they have exchanged email, calls or messages
with.
The information include a full view of each contact, along
with their photo, job title, company details, email history, attachments and
even their updates from Facebook and Twitter.
Xobni uses Smartr, a system that mines our Inbox and our
social media contacts, and matches messages up with people we know.
Yahoo's Recent Acquisitions
Yahoo’s other recent acquisitions include a microblogging platform and social
networking website - tumblr, a video
app for iPhone – Qwiki, a picture
taking application for iPhones – GhostBird Software, a startup that powers games played on smartphones, tablets, consoles or
personal computers – PlayerScale, a local
business discovery service – Alike,
a to-do app – Astrid, a social polling tool – GoPollGo, a news summarization service – Summly.
These acquisitions are in line with the company’s focus on reinventing itself, providing
enhanced products and services geared toward “daily habits” like email, blogs, finance,
sports, weather and photos.
Yahoo planned to use Xobni to improve its Yahoo Mail along
with its other product offerings, while Xobni
remarked that "Soon, you'll be able to use Yahoo! products with Xobni
goodness baked right in."
According to Xobni’s official statement, “The power within every Xobni
product is that it responds to how you communicate. Every day you demonstrate
who and what is important to you. That can benefit not just your inbox or
smartphone, but the many services you use.”
Will Yahoo win the webmail war?
While we can expect significant improvements to Yahoo Mail
with this new acquisition, whether or not Yahoo can win back users who have
flocked to Gmail and perhaps Outlook.com in recent years remains to be seen. Yahoo
also has to convince users who have switched to communicating online via social
media sites like Facebook and apps such as WhatsApp, Line and Viper.
What will Yahoo buy next?
I
wonder what will Yahoo buy next? Will it
be creating its own mobile messaging app soon? As it is, there are many mobile
messaging apps out there. If Yahoo or any company were to create an app, the
biggest challenge is how to win over users. I don’t think people are likely to
install multiple clients on their mobile phones to communicate with each other.
The right “winning” strategy is tantamount to securing a victory in the mobile
messaging war.
Yahoo copied Google - targeted advertising: What about our email privacy?
On a side note, Yahoo and Google have been competing in a lot of areas, and free webmail service is one of them. Following the footsteps of Gmail, Yahoo Mail has also started to provide targeted advertising by automatically scanning our emails.
I have gmail, yahoo mail and outlook.com accounts. While I
know that email has never ever been truly private communication, as if they are
mailed letters going through our good old post offices, I still get a shock when
I was served an advertisement related to legal services when I sent an email to
my solicitor via Yahoo Mail.
Should we be concerned about email privacy at all? My answer
is yes and I am very concerned....
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