End of the walled garden

With the possibility of Microsoft buying Yahoo (or not if you read Techcrunch) and the merged brands that would come out of it - I started to wonder whether there’s room for the big brand, do everything site anymore.

And Yahoo is a great example of that. In the past Yahoo was a mass of great concepts and sites all under the same roof - a sort of Supermarket style website.

A site where you have the dating department, the news department, the photo department and so on. But Yahoo wasn’t the only one - Microsoft did the same thing with MSN and Lycos too.

What seems to be the order of the day in the naughties (and I don’t see it changing) is more of a shopping mall model - lots of different brands under one roof.

It’s fine for one company to own lots of smaller companies as long as they leave them alone to get on with it. Web2.0 is all about community and for community to thrive properly it needs to exist in smaller chunks.

This is why I was slightly reserved about Yahoo and referenced the past tense - it does seem to be changing its approach - although Live is within the Yahoo brand.

Think del.icio.us and Flickr - both smaller sites with strong audiences, owned by Yahoo but outside the Yahoo branding.

However that isn’t always the case - look at Yahoo Pipes or Yahoo Mail - both great examples of services that work really well (or at least are popular or interesting) but within the bigger Yahoo brand.

Other companies do the same thing - Google has its own branded services like Gmail and Docs but also has separately branded services like Blogger and Orkut.

Maybe I’m just spouting bollocks and as long as a service is prepared to integrate, has an API/DevKit and links out - it will work fine.

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