The world of search is run by monolithic companies with one fundamental power: the power to buy. With their immense resources, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are able to obtain both the talented minds and technical hardware necessary to run the show. Further, each of these companies routinely purchases startups. Little is more telling than these “small” purchases, however; they demonstrate where the search titans are aiming in the long run. One recent purchase from Yahoo is especially interesting: the buyout of startup company IntoNow.
IntoNow is just three months old, and has only seven employees. The concept of the company is simple: it provides mobile software that lets users share (via social networks) what movies or shows they’re watching. The software is highly innovative, allowing users to tap a button on their phone while watching a movie or TV show. The show is then identified (“right down to the episode,” according to the official IntoNow site) and broadcast on Twitter and Facebook.
More importantly than this superficial level, however, IntoNow has a strong social element of its own. Beyond broadcasting on the powerhouses of the social networking world, the service allows users to see what shows their friends are into, receive notifications when friends are watching the same thing, and otherwise interact based on what’s being watched.
This represents another step toward social for Yahoo, which already has a strong social base through its Yahoo users (Yahoo Mail remains the most popular free webmail on the market), Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Games, and other Yahoo sites. Yahoo’s gameplan, which since last year has been to abandon search in favor of its profitable social elements, is seeing some significant moves; with some streamlining, it wouldn’t be hard to view Yahoo is a major social network standing toe-to-toe with Facebook as opposed to a collection of sites.
[via the Associated Press]
