Yahoo tests social network component for Answers

Yahoo has started testing a social-network component for Yahoo Answers, a search engine in which people post questions and answers that have become a highly popular service for the company.

On Thursday, Yahoo Answers Network debuted as a beta service designed to let the 90 million users of this question-and-answer search engine create "personal networks" with each other. They can also invite acquaintances who don't use Yahoo Answers to join their network.

People will be able to see if other members of their Yahoo Answers network have posted an answer or a question or flagged someone else's question as interesting, according to Yahoo.

Yahoo plans to continue enhancing Yahoo Answers Network with features like the ability to block and ignore users and to import contacts from other services like the Yahoo Messenger instant messaging network.

The move is consistent with Yahoo's aggressive strategy in social computing, a hallmark of the Web 2.0 era. In recent years, Yahoo has been busy acquiring social-computing companies like Flickr, del.icio.us, and, more recently, MyBlogLog as well as revamping existing sites and services with social features like tagging and user-generated content.

Yahoo Answers is a bright spot for the company. Archrival Google had a competing service called Google Answers that never took off and was put out to pasture last year. In late December of last year, market researcher Hitwise Pty. reported that among Q&A-type search engines, Yahoo Answers held a 96 percent of share of visits in the U.S. Answerbag ranked second with 2.04 percent, and Microsoft's Windows Live Q&A came in third with 1.02 percent.

By giving this new feature to Yahoo Answers, with its large and growing audience, Yahoo might be able to improve its standing in social networking. Its blogging and social networking-site Yahoo 360, introduced in March 2005, hasn't become as popular as Yahoo expected. In November at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo's vice president of product strategy, said the company might remake Yahoo 360, but the company hasn't rolled out any significant enhancements to it yet.

Last year there were insistent rumors that Yahoo was shopping around for a social-networking site and that it held conversations with Facebook that didn't yield a deal. However, Yahoo has massive numbers of users in services like Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Mail, Flickr, del.icio.us and Yahoo Photos that some analysts have pointed out could be leveraged to create social networks.

Yahoo Answers Network could indicate a strategy focused on creating distinct social networks within individual and already popular services, rather than on having a single social-networking site that competes head to head with the likes of MySpace.com, Friendster and Facebook. In fact, new social-networking providers are targeting their sites toward specific audiences and topics, instead of trying to cast a broad net like MySpace.com and the other leaders in this market.

More information about Yahoo Answers Network can be found here.