Some companies are winners and some companies are even better because they are survivors. Yahoo is one such company.

While Google's popular search engine seems to get all the newsprint, Yahoo, which has a good number of hits too, doesn't always get mileage – unless a company like Microsoft tries to take it over. However, Yahoo isn't doing too badly in terms of unique visitors. According to compete.com, as of September 2008, while Google had in excess of 132 million visitors, Yahoo with its 129 million unique visitors was not all that far behind.

Now, in order to regain its place as a top-notch site, Yahoo has launched a series of tools for developers in order to add a social dimension to almost everything it does. Writing about this in the company's blog, Sam Pullara, vice president, Yahoo Application Platform, says, "Users will begin to experience what we call a social dimension across Yahoo. We'll activate our network horizontally across Yahoo. Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger will encourage users to connect with the people that they care the most about. For example, Mail will incentivise connections by enabling users to filter their inboxes to see emails just from social connections."

And if you thought this was all, you are wrong because Pullara has more – Mail, Messenger, the front page of Yahoo, and My Yahoo will allow people to see things their connections have been doing across Yahoo and the web.

Finally, Yahoo's media properties will contribute to social relevancy by encouraging users to share experiences with each other.

The offerings

Doesn't this sound suspiciously like Facebook? Before we consider the above question, let's look at what exactly Yahoo is offering as part of the Yahoo Open Strategy (Y!OS) 1.0 platform. These predominantly include the Yahoo Social Platform (YSP), which makes it possible for developers to write social applications, the Yahoo Query Language (YQL) that lets developers access web services using a SQL-like language, and the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP), which is slated to soon become the mechanism for distributing application to millions of users on Yahoo's homepages, media sites, and mail properties.

As Pullara has mentioned in his blog post, the strong social networking focus is evident all throughout Y!OS.

What is Yahoo's strategy? To understand this, we have to realize that Yahoo is a "slow and steady" company.

A case in point is Web mail. While Hotmail launched in July 1996, Yahoo Mail came out only in October 1997. But many an old user will talk about Yahoo Mail's reliability. Similarly, now, Yahoo has come up with its social
networking services, much after Facebook, which has been around since February 2004.

Will it, won't it?

But can Yahoo convince users that it is now a social networking company? This is a million dollar question even for a billion dollar company that had more than a million hits in 1994, when few knew what the Web was.

 Unique visitors in September 08

Google: 132,730,431
Yahoo: 129,409,582