Yahoo Ups The Ante With Two New Mobile Offerings

Yahoo is ramping up its push onto the mobile Web with a pair of moves expanding its social networking and search services on cell phones.

One is the launch of its oneConnect tool, letting mobile users centralize a wide range of social networking applications in one place on their phones. The service is built around a mobile customer's address book, and allows them to stay on top of activity on their various social and professional networks. That includes checking status updates on sites such as Facebook and MySpace as well as viewing photo uploads and any recent activities among friends.

Users can also link to instant-messaging and SMS text messaging services via oneConnect, whether Yahoo Messenger or competing services such as Google Talk and AOL Instant Messenger.

Other features enable mobile consumers to keep a list of favorite messaging contacts and a "social contact card" that archives past communications with people and provides one-click ways to initiate calls or messages. A location-based service also enables oneConnect users to find nearby friends through GPS tracking.

Yahoo said oneConnect should be available on most mobile devices and browsers following its release on Yahoo Go 3.0 and its mobile home page during the second quarter of 2008. The company is also working on versions compatible with Apple's iPhone and the BlackBerry.

The initiative builds on Yahoo's launch of oneSearch for mobile last year and its broader efforts to dominate the mobile Web. In particular, the company has focused on forging content and advertising deals with wireless operators. To date, it has notched 29 carrier partnerships worldwide covering more than 600 million subscribers, according to a release.

Separately, Yahoo announced Tuesday that it would become the exclusive mobile search provider for T-Mobile in Europe, replacing Google starting in March. The deal represents a rare triumph for Yahoo over Google in search, even as it deals with Microsoft's unwelcome takeover bid. (Google separately announced that its search engine would be integrated into Nokia's mobile search service.)

T-Mobile and Yahoo also plan to team up to launch T-Mobile versions of popular Yahoo offerings such as Flickr, messenger, mail, weather and finance.

Yahoo has previously inked distribution deals for oneSearch with AT&T in the U.S., American Movil in Latin America, Rogers Wireless in Canada and Telefonica in Europe and Latin America, among others. The company made the oneConnect and T-Mobile announcements at the Global System for Mobile Association (GSMA) Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Next story loading loading..