Tech Digest: Yahoo oneConnect is excellent, but will Microsoft and Facebook derail it?

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Yahoo oneConnect is excellent, but will Microsoft and Facebook derail it?

While at Mobile World Congress, I grabbed a demo of oneConnect, Yahoo's innovative new mobile application that draws various social networks and instant messaging apps into one place, including Yahoo's services, but also MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MSN Messenger and AIM.

It's expected to be included in Yahoo's Go 3.0 application by June this year. I was really impressed at how slick it is, and how neatly it presents the different information from all these different Web 2.0 feeds. There's a Pulse feature that lets you see people's profile updates and photo uploads too.

However, it seems the app could be derailed after a complaint from Microsoft, and concern from Facebook over how Yahoo is pulling in information from their services, and whether it's respecting people's privacy.

Microsoft now says it's "investigating" Yahoo's inclusion of Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger in oneConnect. Microsoft's Andy Chu has told MocoNews that "I was a little shocked when they talked about the Messenger [aspect]. Yahoo at the moment is not in our developer program, nor is the third party that they mentioned. So we're investigating how that actually happened."

Meanwhile, while Facebook's Jed Stremel says oneConnect is "very promising", he's also concerned about the application tying in with Facebook status messages. "I'd be very interested to make sure that they're using our APIs in a way that respects user privacy, and we're certainly looking forward to that discussion."

Watch this one run. I genuinely was wowed by the demo of oneConnect, but that's because it included all those non-Yahoo social networks too - if they force Yahoo to drop them, oneConnect won't be as useful. Cue negotiations.

oneConnect website