With Yahoo! oneConnect you’ll be free to use all your favorite communications tools and services to connect with anyone, at anytime. From IM or text, email or social networks; Yahoo! oneConnect intends to integrate all the ways you communicate into a unique, mobile experience. Imagine having all your contact information at your fingertips; email, phone numbers, text, and IM addresses; in one location—your phone.

Announced yesterday at the Mobile World Congress, Yahoo’s oneConnect sounds like potentially a big deal for mobile users, if it’s done right.  It is intended to be an aggregator and integrator of all your messaging and social applications – and will support:

• Facebook
• Flickr
• Twitter
• Myspace
• Linked In
• Last.fm
• Bebo
• Dopplr
• hi5

By just using this one program, you will be able to see which of your contacts are online, view recent messages and status updates, uploaded photos, and more – as well as being able to send and receive messages via email, IM, and SMS.

This sort of ‘tie it all together’ program – to present you with a single view of email, IM, and social networking stuff – would be a *huge* winner in my book.  I find it increasingly difficult to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, and various email accounts.  I like using all of these when I can, but generally find that I’m neglecting one or more of them.  The closest I’ve seen so far to what oneConnect is promising is Plaxo’s Pulse – but the list of what it currently supports is not near as comprehensive.

Speaking of Pulse, oneConnect has a ‘Pulse’ feature – which will give you the most recent updates of all your contacts across all the social networks it monitors – showing you things like photos added to Flickr by friends, Facebook page updates, and recent Twitter tweets.  That’s very much like what Plaxo’s Pulse offers as well.

One of the big keys to how effective oneConnect will be is how well it supports popular messaging and social platforms.  In addition to the social apps listed above, it will also support AIM, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk on the IM client side, and Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL Mail for email.

TechCrunch seems to think oneConnect may be very well placed for success:

This fits in nicely with Yang’s “starting point” strategy. There can only be a few starting points on the mobile Web, and Yahoo is well on its way to being one of them.

oneConnect is due to be launched in the second quarter of this year, and I’m very keen to get a look at it.

For more background and details on oneConnect, have a look HERE.

Via: TechCrunch

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