David Emery OnlineSocial networks seem to matter, honest
20 June 2007
Apple really, really cares about the iPhone.
In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Apple engage in such a sustained push for any one product before. Not only have we had a – practically – iPhone-only keynote by Steve Jobs in January, but we’ve had a steady drip of features and news since then.
Earlier this week came the news that the iPhone has a surprisingly long battery life, which was one of the main negative points people were predicating, along with the scratch-ability of the screen which also got an upgrade to glass at the same time.
Today we have the news that the iPhone is going to support YouTube. It looks like a very nice addition to the iPhone feature set, and really cements the Google<-->Apple relationship. YouTube have just rolled out a mobile version of the site (m.youtube.com), which is utterly woeful in comparison to the iPhone app – indeed, I couldn’t get to work on my Nokia N70, and I’ve heard reports that it doesn’t work on the Nokia N95 as well, which is being seen as one of the better iPhone rivals.
Of course, this announcement really, really makes a mockery of the WWDC announcement that the SDK for the iPhone is Safari, and web based applications. If that was such a viable option, why haven’t Apple used it for their YouTube app? The answer is that the iPhone’s version of Safari doesn’t support Flash (which is a massive blow, if you ask me, but one that will surely be rectified in due course), and hence the YouTube app uses H264 as its video codec which is supported.
They could have made a web-based custom version of YouTube, based on h264 though, without any problems whatsoever. But they didn’t.
Continuing on the Yahoo! talk from Monday comes the – admittedly baseless – rumour that News Corp. may swap MySpace for 30% of Yahoo!. Crazy as this sounds, I think this would be a great deal for Yahoo!
Yahoo! are currently in a dangerous position. Large-scale social networks are here to stay and have become massively popular, in the same way that portals were back in Yahoo!’s heyday. However, Yahoo! has no foothold in this area – while it has plenty of sites that incorporate social features like Flickr and Upcoming, it doesn’t have a pure social networking site like Facebook or MySpace.
And they need one bad.
Looking at it the other way, becoming controlled by Yahoo! would be the best possible thing to happen to MySpace. Currently, with the rise of Facebook, they are – quite simply – screwed. They need to rapidly develop and adapt to meet the challenges they’re faced with, and I can’t think of any company that is more suited to doing it then Yahoo.
MySpace still commands a huge mind-and-market share, and could still put up a very strong fight against Facebook. But the way it is now, they’re just sitting still. Dead in the water.
Yahoo! could be the only hope for MySpace, and MySpace could be the only hope for Yahoo!
Either that or they’ll both die together.