Yahoo Updates: Too little, too late to Compete with Facebook Connect?

Yahoo, the other day, came out with their version of Facebook Connect i.e. Yahoo Updates. Its a collaboration between Yahoo! and JS-Kit, a leading distributed social network connecting more than 600,000 sites across the Web, including AOL, Evite, Experian, JetBlue, Sun Microsystems, and WorldNow. Through this integration, JS-Kit is making it easy for their vast network of publishers to benefit from the power of Yahoo! Updates. Eventually, each story a publisher sends to the Yahoo! Updates feed will benefit from referral traffic to Yahoo!’s most popular sites: Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Toolbar, Profiles, and more. Yahoo! has implemented the open standard OAuth in its system.

The vision is to allow readers to authenticate themselves with a trusted 3rd party. They will find it easier to post comments. It offers exposure to site owners when comments are syndicated into activity streams on bigger sites and should allow site owners to access verified information about their readers’ profiles and interests (which is to come later eventually.)

Though we are yet to see any off-site usability of Yahoo Updates, we hope its just around the corner. Again, as we tried the demo version of Js-kit, we still see that facebook features are still there and are most likely to be there separately.

The screen-shot as you can see, has my comment on there which is pretty easy and nice. You can even add photos too.

What we see for now is promising. I have the feeling if Yahoo Updates is too little too late as Facebook connect is well and truly into it. But anyway, Yahoo still has a combined userbase which is pretty enviable for any company for that matter. So who will want to lose that opportunity?

Will you use Yahoo Updates or Facebook connect or both or none? Tell us, write to us. We will be looking forward to your opinions.

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