We’re launching into a week of major announcements from the tech giants of the world which could lead to major changes for tech-savvy youth culture.
First, the rumors have been mounting among fashionistas and fashion websites that Google will be launching an enormous fashion site on Wednesday, November 17, 2010. The idea of the Google fashion site is that it will enable people to get designer/runway/celeb looks fast within a series of virtual boutiques. Reports say that users will be able to create personalized online stores at Boutiques.com and other boutiques that Google has created from high profile fashion bloggers (thus all of the leaks on this news). You won’t be able to buy the product directly from Boutiques.com, but it will provide you with a link of an online store that does carry the item.
It is rumored that the new site will be launched during the “Tech Fuses with High Fashion” party that Google is holding on Wednesday in New York.
Next, is that Yahoo is moving into crowdsourced content bigtime -similar to AOL’s Seed plan of action. A recent job ad on Yahoo calls for 400,000 writers, photographers, and videographers to contribute in areas of sports, news, finance, and other categories with the possibility of getting paid depending on the amount of traffic your work attracts. It’s tapping into its Associated Content online community publishing platform that they bought last May for $100 million.
Like AOL, Yahoo has been also hiring some big guns in various media to help shape the crowdsourced content editorial. With readers now contributing, Yahoo will be able to deliver hyper-local news and it will assist editors in making sure the most wanted content is delivered to readers.
Taking place live, right now in San Francisco is the announcement from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg that they are launching a messaging technology. Zuckerberg is saying that “email is too slow” (which it is and is no longer the main source of electronic communication among youth culture, as we’ve tracked in our Youth Culture Studies).
According to Zuckerman, 350 million people use Facebook’s messaging amounting to 4 billion messages per day.
The 3 main features of the new messaging product include seamless messaging, conversation history, and social inbox. Again, Zuckerman is saying “it’s not email” but it does handle email, IM, SMS, and other forms of communication.
“It is not an email killer.”
More on this soon as the conference continues.