• Marketwatch, Monday, December 11, 2006 10:32 AM

The long tail keeps dragging out, pulled by user-generated content. Mass media is no longer about getting millions of people to read something written by a few people, but getting a few people to read millions of items written by millions of people. It's also about making millions of people volunteer experts.

The people provide the content; this is happening at MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, but not at Yahoo, a company that has come under fire for slowing revenue growth and a lack of direction.

Once upon a time, social media was an area that could have been dominated by Yahoo. After all, it bought community site GeoCities for $4.6 billion in 1999 and then eGroups for $400 million the same year--well before Facebook and MySpace. Then it bought Broadcast.com for $4.7 billion, so it really should have been the first MySpace or YouTube.

What went wrong? The technology and the timing were all wrong back in 1999, but now, the company should put its existing community platforms, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo 360 and GeoCities, to better use. One ridiculous problem is that the communities themselves aren't interconnected. You can't do social media without a great internal network. Yahoo's inability to integrate its many assets, however excellent (Flickr, Yahoo Answers), underscores Yahoo's real problem: It's been diluting its value and impact.

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