Six Degrees Join Yahoo to go after the Web 2.0 Market
by Bill Ives
Yahoo is putting together a group of scientists to improve their market potion. Their fields reinforce the concept that web 2.0 is more about people, participation, and connection. Rather than simply a team of technical experts, I am sure they have them also, they are also looking into the social sciences. Most notably, they took in Duncan Watts professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he was director of the Collective Dynamics Group, and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. As reported in CNet News, Duncan will “lead Yahoo’s research in human social dynamics, including social networks and collaborative problem solving.” Watts,
They also got Preston McAfee, the J. Stanley Johnson professor of business, economics and management at the California Institute of Technology, Preston “will be a vice president and research fellow leading Yahoo’s microeconomics research group.” He is quoted, “(Yahoo has assembled) the largest group of academic-level economists in a corporate environment since Bell Labs. We’re not focused on immediate product development, but on where we see these markets going…(The Internet) is the next frontier of the application of market design in the real world.”
I think this is a smart move. It gets better as Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research said that having researchers who aren’t focused on computer science will not only help Yahoo improve its product and service development, but could lead to advances in the development of technologies underlying the Internet. As a social scientist that has been working with IT people for a long time, I really applaud this move and this thought process. It will be interesting to see where it goes and what advances make their way inside the enterprise. Thanks to Valdis Krebs for pointing out this move.
