The portal company starts the week after CES with a new social networking company purchase; this time Terry Semel’s M&A have picked up music playlist community site Webjay.
Webjay and its founder, Lucas Gonze, have become the latest additions to the growing Yahoo collection of social networking sites. Yahoo announced the deal on the Y! Music Blog. Ian Rogers from Yahoo Music gave the details.
With Dave Goldberg (head of Yahoo! Music) running around telling people that the playlist is the next frontier in digital media, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that we’re interested in what Lucas is doing with Webjay. Y! Music Engine has some interesting playlisting features, open APIs, and more goodies on the way. Lucas will help shape our strategies around playlisting in the future.
Webjay joins companies like del.icio.us, Flickr, and Konfabulator as ones that can be filed under Yahoo Acquisitions. Webjay should become part of the options available to registered users, who can search out music or video files (ideally using Yahoo’s search options) and assemble them into a Webjay playlist.
This could signal the beginning of a push by Yahoo, this time for the type of users that have made News Corp’s MySpace such a potent place in social networking. MySpace has a young, media savvy audience, and it’s not a stretch to picture Yahoo doing something with its 360 service to try and grab some of that highly lusted-after demographic for its advertisers.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
