Yahoo's Upcoming Assault on Mount MySpace
Yahoo recently announced the acquisition of Upcoming.org, a web-based event planning app. Yahoo's general manager of Local said "We're not only after more of a presence in the event space. It's important to tap into the energy of a community as vibrant as Upcoming's is."

Prior to news of the acquisition I'd not heard of Upcoming.org, though I've recently gotten the impression that it's sort of a west coast digerati tool.

The acquisition puts me in mind of News Corps' MySpace acquisition (MySpace, like Upcoming.org, are both LA-based apps), and I think Yahoo's positioning to snag some of that explosive MySpace usage. MySpace is, from a search engine perspective, a walled garden, closed off from crawlers, with millions of pages of local, personalized information searchable only by their lame-ass on site search function.

Granted, if MySpace were suddenly crawlable we'd probably see a rash of blog-related firings.

What I'm getting at is that I think Yahoo's in a great position to leverage their search property to drive the usage of their social networking apps by including event/360 results in their local SERPS.

Given Borrell's recent prediction that "by 2010 spending on local search will reach $4.07 billion and account for 12% of the $34.81 billion of the total forecast online ad market for that year," Yahoo's sitting pretty.

For now I've not seen any local ads on MySpace, beyond those from the enterprising local businesses, artists, and bands in Raleigh who've created their own profiles and communicate with their customers through bulletins and blog posts.

I've done Friendster, Orkut and now I'm pretty much a MySpace wh0re. If Yahoo can tie/patch/duct tape together 360, upcoming.org and Flikr (which is an energetic and vibrant community in its own right) we may see a major MySpace competitor from Yahoo in a year or two. Especially if they can beat MySpace in functionality, which frankly shouldn't be all that tough.

And Yahoo will be positioned to eat a large chunk of that 4 billion in local search spend.

Social networking + maps + event planning = taking local search way beyond the yellow pages.

Coverage:
MVox
MediaPost
Yahoo's Blog
Greg Sterling

Update:
Battlle drops news of Google's Maps and Local mashup. Now if they can link in blogger and make Orkut somehow cool MySpace might have another behemoth at its heels.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |