NEWS
Yahoo! on Wednesday released a preview version of a free new iPhone application called OneConnect that can centralise communications and social-networking activity.
Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Yahoo! Connected Life, said in a speech at the CTIA Wireless show: "OneConnect allows everybody to keep connected to the persons they care about. It's a socially connected address book. The address book now comes to life."
Yahoo! is racing against Google and others to bring more applications to mobile devices in an effort to tap into the growth of mobile internet use. Previous Yahoo! applications such as OneSearch and Go compete against Google applications including Gmail, Search and Maps.
One feature of OneConnect, called Pulse, "allows you to tap into everything going on with your friends", Boerries said. It pulls a news feed from "Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Last.fm - all the leading social networks - into one aggregated view".
A related "Favourites" feature lets people track or quickly contact the handful of people in a user's inner circle.
Another feature provides a unified hub of instant messaging, SMS messages and email.
OneConnect will be released in the US initially but "toward the end of the year will branch out to the rest of the world", Boerries said. Also coming will be versions for other phones. "The other ones will follow soon shortly," including BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile, and Nokia Series 60 phones, he said - but not for the Palm OS-based version of Treo phones.
Google, meanwhile, had its own news. It announced a new version of its Mobile App for BlackBerry users. This software lets people search the web, with a boost from search suggestions and previous search history, and get links to Google Docs stored online. The company already had an iPhone version of Google Mobile App.
Yahoo! also announced Wednesday it's increasing the profile of its Blueprint software foundation for developing mobile phone software. Blueprint consists of a "runtime" foundation tuned for each supported mobile device and software components programmers can use to build applications that run on that foundation.
Previously, Blueprint could only be used to develop "widget" applications that would run within the Yahoo! Go mobile phone software. Now, though, it can be used to develop standalone applications that anyone can develop and distribute, Boerries said. Programmers wishing to do so can set their download sites so they transparently take advantage of Yahoo!'s back-end service to identify what phone a user has and to supply the appropriate Blueprint runtime, he added.
