Yahoo! makes another significant play for social media

11 May 2007 | Community, Culture, Eventness, Internet, Marketing, Media | Comments

Kudos to Fred Stutzman’s “Unit Structures” blog for picking up a CNET thread about a big hire at Yahoo! Duncan Watts.

(This is not to mention the simultaneous hire of economist R. Preston McAfee, but for the purposes of this blog it’s the Watts hire that is interesting.)
Along with books like Barabasi’s “Linked,” Tapscott and Williams’ “Wikinomics,” Jenkins’ “Covergence Culture” and looking back at Gleick’s “Chaos” and many others, Watts’ book “Six Degrees” is a significant popular work on interconnectedness and how it is changing the face of just about everything.

Yahoo!’s purchase of photo-sharing site Flickr, social bookmarking site Del.ico.us, integration of Yahoo! Instant Messenger with its online email service and other moves shows that the company is thinking hard about collective/social/co-created/wiki media.

Despite the company’s grim recent earnings report, this week’s hires are good news.