2 weeks after Google released its Google Social Graph API, Yahoo Japan opened “Yahoo Profile” service. The service integrates their Social Networking Service, Yahoo Days’ profile pages and Open ID user profiles. On Yahoo Profile page, you’ll see friends list, and feeds in addition to profile information. It looks much like SNS’s member top page.

Yahoo Days members aren’t as active as other popular SNSs in Japan such as mixi and Grree, and if and how many users they can maintain and hopefully gain in up coming months are questionable. I’m sure that they’ll add more functions (blog, image and video sharing, etc.) to it, which would make Yahoo Profile even more like a social networking service. However, it would still be another SNS site, and can deny the feel of Yahoo Japan being a follower in this area rather than a leader.

Yahoo Japan’s member database (Yahoo ID holders, Yahoo’s broadband users, Yahoo mobile users, etc.) is huge and is very valuable to many out side businesses. I think the real value of Yahoo Profile would come when they can combine all of these database, and release it to outside vendors.