SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Yahoo! oneConnect, a new social-networking application for iPhone, hit the streets September 10th. According to Yahoo!, oneConnect “brings together a user’s circle of friends, their lives and all the ways they communicate into one seamless, easy-to-use application. With Yahoo! oneConnect, users can integrate all their contacts, send instant or SMS messages, post their status and view the latest activity from their favorite social networks.”A preview version of the app is available free of charge in the Apple iPhone App Store. The initial product works with iPhone and iPod Touch, but support for additional devices is expected within months.
“The iPhone has ignited and captured the imagination of what a mobile phone can do,” said Yahoo! Connected Life Vice President Marco Boerries. “The rich feature set of the iPhone enables the best way to experience oneConnect. The powerful combination of Yahoo! Blueprint, the mobile platform, and the iPhone SDK was leveraged to create this unique experience of oneConnect for millions of iPhone users.”
oneConnect’s key features include:
– Full-featured address book that integrates contacts from the user’s Yahoo! address book, iPhone and social networks.
– Pulse, which tracks what’s happening on a variety of social networks including Bebo, Dopplr, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Last.fm, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.
– Integrated mobile messaging via SMS and Yahoo! Messenger with support for avatars, photos and emoticons.
– A favorites list that allows users to connect quickly with their most important contacts.
“oneConnect allows everybody to keep connected to the persons they care about,” Boerries told a demonstration audience during the CTIA Wireless show. “It’s a socially connected address book, [but] the address book now comes to life.”
oneConnect is the latest in a series of applications Yahoo! is developing in order to keep pace with competitors in the mobile space. Other apps in Yahoo!’s mobile portfolio include oneSearch and Go.
