International Law

oneConnect

The New York Times offers a glimpse of Yahoo's oneConnect:

Yahoo is working on a mobile service called oneConnect designed to aggregate contacts and communications around what it calls a "socially connected address book."

The service, due to launch in the second quarter this year, will be open and other companies are free to join, Yahoo said Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

OneConnect draws information from social-networking sites such as MySpace, instant-messaging services such as Yahoo Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger, and e-mail services including Yahoo Mail and Google's Gmail to build a picture of the mood, location and activities of friends and colleagues.

It also stores details of recent communications with address-book contacts, including instant-messaging and e-mail exchanges. All the information held about a person can be viewed on a "social contact card."

Location data is calculated by GPS (Global Positioning System) in handsets that have it, or deduced from nearby cell tower locations. Users of the service can keep their locations private, or opt to share that information with others.

Combining all the information gathered by the service allows Yahoo to alert users of the service when friends arrive in town, or to let them follow up on unfinished business when colleagues become available.

Read more here and visit the oneConnect site here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on February 14, 2008 (boomark / email).