Yahoo Launches Apple iPhone Social Networking App

Yahoo on Wednesday rolled out an application for Apple's iPhone that enables users to manage their mobile messaging and social networking contacts with one interface.

At the CTIA conference in San Francisco, the company said its oneConnect application essentially creates a socially connected address book.

A feature of oneConnect, called Pulse, lets an iPhone user have one screen to see the status updates of all their friends on social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube.

"Rather than going to six sites, you need one click on Pulse in OneConnect," said Marco Boerries, executive VP of Yahoo's Connected Life group, during a presentation.

But if one has enough contacts, it's possible to get lost in all the status updates across the many sites. To combat this, a Favorites features enables users to build a specific list of friends to follow.

For messaging, the application also can integrate instant messaging, text messages, and e-mail into a threaded conversation. With this, a user could begin a conversation with a contact over IM, and it could be continued via SMS or e-mail. The application currently only works with Yahoo's IM, but the company expects other IM support in the coming months.

The app is available for free in Apple's App Store, and it is expected to be available on other devices in the near future, Boerries said.

The iPhone oneConnect application was built and optimized for the iPhone using Yahoo's Blueprint, an open source mobile platform. Boerries said the company had talked with Apple about possibly sharing this with other developers, but for now it will only be used internally by Yahoo.