What the hell is wrong with Yahoo!

Recently I logged into my Yahoo email account after a long time period. So, I was surprised to see that now Yahoo allows you sign in using either Google or Facebook ids. I always thought that Yahoo and Google were competitors with both of them competing on various forums like ‘search engines’, and ‘emails’ among lots of other services.

But isn’t it the inevitable truth of the future. While 80s, 90s and the last decade was about consolidation of brick and mortar form of businesses, the next decade will be about consolidation of Internet content. And the great thing here is that you don’t actually need to takeover other companies using loads of cash. The merger can be only at the user end with both the entities acting as a separate business. Thus in this case it is more of partnering rather than consolidation.

But it is consolidation in the sense that now you don’t need different ids and password for every service on the internet. With one gmail id, you can create a Facebook account. (Remember FB does not ask you to create a user id and asks the email id for the login credentials). Now once you are into FB, the whole world is waiting for you. You can log in to basically every other service by establishing a connection between your FB account and the service. Take Digg for example. It is a social bookmarking site and it allows one to log in to the site using his FB id. The same is now true for Yahoo

It goes the other way round as well. Now you don’t need to log in to FB anymore to read the feeds. Yahoo mail gives you the option to import your FB feeds into your email and read it there only.

You ask, what is in it for me. Well, I tell you! Look at someone like me, who works in a company that does not allow me to access FB using office internet. But they allow Gmail and Yahoo. Do I need to tell anything more?

So hail the merger and collaborations that these service providers are doing for the end-users like us. We don’t need to maintain and excel to tell us what is our id and password for all these services, because now I have got the FB power.