Yahoo and Google will Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network

Google and Yahoo are moving to to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, he said: “We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social.”

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Google Launches OpenSocial

Google Launches OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a set of APIs that will allow independent developers to build applications that run on any participating network, using the data stored by that network.

Techcrunch, which posted the first details of the announcement, claims that OpenSocial’s hosts, or the participating social networks, include Google’s Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

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