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Yahoo's Academic Take on Social Networking

Barry pointed out an interesting piece of news that I hadn't previously had a chance to comment on. Yahoo recently hired an economist and a social scientist to help them 'shape the future of the web'. Here's a look at social networking communities and where these academics fit into Yahoo's plans.

By augmenting our team with experts of the stature of McAfee and Watts, we've successfully incorporated new areas into our research. This enables us to gain powerful insights from our audiences and answer complex questions in areas including search and information navigation, social media, community, personalization, and mobility.

If you ask me, the first half of the statement - which pertains to getting insight into a community from your audience - is incredibly easy. One of the great things about communities on the social web is that once individuals embrace a community, they see it as a personal investment and they want to provide feedback to help improve the community. You can see this from when I profiled Dell's community project - IdeaStorm. More to the point, Yahoo has its own version of a community feedback project which we covered earlier, called Yahoo! Suggestion Board. A quick look shows that the Yahoo community is indeed very active on the site providing feedback on how to improve the multitude of services Yahoo offers.

The main concern in such situations is creating an incentive that allows you to build a community and ensures interaction, which Yahoo has already accomplished. Where these academics will come in handy is in interpreting the information Yahoo gets from their suggestion board and creating plans about how to implement what the community is demanding. And if you look at McAfee's and Watts' backgrounds it makes perfect sense for Yahoo to add them to the team.