Anomalies are very rare in life, unless of course you’re an online junkie in the web 2.0 field. Apparently it seems that Yahoo!, known recently for missing great opportunities and creating worse ones, seems to have copied an idea from the search engine king’s Dodgeball and taken it to the next level.
What did Yahoo! create you say? Mixd.
(Information Week) Yahoo has quietly launched an experimental site that offers mobile-phone subscribers the ability to send text messages and share videos and pictures among friends. The service follows a trend among Internet portals to offer mobile social-networking services. […]
The service is centered on making it easy for groups of friends to use text messaging as a way to organize a party, meet in a restaurant, attend a football game or arrange any other social activity. Yahoo expects users to form a lot of ad hoc groups around particular events, and use the service’s “reply-to-all” feature as way to communicate collectively.
Yahoo!’s Mixd seems to be a mobile version of Facebook, allowing users to form private chats as well as interact with large groups (although this may increase your phone bill as text messaging can be quite expensive). Yahoo even creates a mini “media journal” site for each group, allowing users to take an interactive trip down memory lane as users are able to view images, text and video shared between members of the group.
Ironically this may be Yahoo!’s answer to actually owning another “useful” social network, (instead of buying one overpriced) one that can easily compliment its other two favorites Flickr and Del.icio.us. Mixd may also help regain some favor with the web base as well, enabling them to not only conquer some new territory, but generate some money from it as well (which would definitely help them out on Wall Street).
