Yahoo Outsources All That Social Nonsense To Facebook

Yahoo continues their strategic defeat from the front lines of innovation. Earlier today they announced that they’d be “deeply integrating” with Facebook Connect, allowing Yahoo users “to see your Facebook friends’ activities on Yahoo! and share Yahoo! content – ratings, photos, article comments, and more – directly on your Facebook stream.”

In other words, they’ve given up on their idea of leveraging all the known social connections among Yahoo email, address book and messenger users. Instead, they’ve outsourced all that social nonsense to Facebook.
In April 2008 Yahoo unveiled it’s plans to “re-wire Yahoo from the inside out…as part of this, we are going to make the consumer experience at Yahoo social throughout, and provide hooks for that for developers to do the same.” This was the centerpiece of Yahoo’s go-forward strategy. The company boasted 10 billion social connections among users, and they’d leverage that in the new Yahoo.
As recently as two months ago Yahoo confirmed to me that they were still behind this social strategy, and would be making announcements soon. And their recent re-hire of Daniel Raffel convinced us they were being sincere:
Since returning in late August, Raffel has been serving as a senior product manager under Cody Simms, the senior director of product management for Yahoo Open Source (Y!OS), we hear. He’s apparently working on mainly off-network projects such as making the Yahoo authentication platform more seamless. That might not sound sexy, but the bigger picture may be involve Yahoo building out its own platform product to better connect Yahoo with the rest of the web. Yes, think Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and the like. The chance to get into this hot space and play a critical role in building a “Yahoo Connect,” may have also enticed Raffel to come back, but that’s pure speculation at