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Yahoo! has been making plans for sometime to allow developers in and help build software based on a the Yahoo! platform.

On Tuesday the “rewiring” will start.  Developers will now be able to create applications to work with many of Yahoo!’s current line-up of software, like Mail and Search. New capabilities will be built into the site, like being able to track your “friends” pictures and activities.

Some would say Yahoo! is getting into the game too late.  MySpace and Facebook, sites who dominate in social networking, already have millions of users and thousands of developers working off their respective platforms.

Yahoo! does already have a tremedous user base, going back to the days of the site just being a search engine.  As long as a user logs into Yahoo! the site can then track how they rated a book or movie or when they add pictures and send that information only to people who the users says is a friend.

Although many companies have similar types of sites that allow people to share photos, ratings of movies, e-mail, etc, Yahoo! hopes to put this all under the same platform, namely Yahoo!.  This would help drive traffic to the site, which inturn would help the sale of advertising and other sources of revenue for the company.

picture from http://www.dnjournal.com

written by tom

CBS has opened their own version of citizen journalism site. The user generated news site, CBSeyemobile.com also offers mobile applications that make it easier for citizens like you and me to submit photos and videos.  With pictures of cheerleaders and videos of usually half-naked “thezomgblog” commenting on politics it is clear that someone is asleep at the wheel.
Although users have their own idea of what “news” is, CBS is not giving visitors warnings about not-safe-for-work pictures.  Visitors can only see what is popular, not what is newsworthy.  This is a problem considering this is a CBS-branded site.

As the news media tries to reach out and let users interact, they also face the fact that they need a moderator.  Sites, like Facebook,  that seem to be totally user controlled do have moderators.  Perhaps in their need to jump on the user-generated news band wagon CBS has forgotten this key element, which could mean the death of this recently born site.

written by tom