Carol Bartz promises a more social Yahoo

Carol Bartz wants Yahoo to provide a more social experience for users

Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz has been outlining the company's future strategy, including plans to partner with social networks and Web 2.0 sites to provide a more social customer experience.

Bartz talked openly for the first time about her top priorities during a session at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco yesterday, saying how the Yahoo platform would be opened up to third parties to offer users what they need.

"I am not a big NIH [not invented here]," she said. "I do not believe we can invent the next Facebook."

The NIH term is used to describe companies that are unwilling to adopt an idea or product because it has not been developed in-house.

Bartz explained that she had people looking at how Yahoo could partner with sites such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Skype to make the user experience "as seamless as possible as they move from Yahoo to more social places".

However, Bartz said that these new Yahoo partnerships are unlikely to be unveiled in the near future. The ideas are on her "wouldn't it be wonderful list " but are not at the top of the Yahoo agenda.

Bartz did point to Yahoo's new home page, currently in development, as an example of a partnership strategy that is already underway.

The home page is being opened up to third-party providers, and Bartz claimed that Yahoo will not worry about losing customers to those providers. "Our home page is very old fashioned, and I am very excited about the new home page coming out," she added.

Bartz pointed to Yahoo Maps as another example of partnership needs. She admitted that Yahoo is behind Google on its mapping system, and would have to partner with other sites to beef up the product because of the huge cost of generating map content.

"I don't use Yahoo Maps, I use Google Maps," she said. "I'm just telling you that I don't think we have paid enough attention to it."

However, in a break from the partner strategy, Bartz did say that Yahoo is working on improving its own photo-sharing capabilities in-house.

Yahoo intends to make uploading photos by email a lot easier, and Bartz called the "little attachments" that Yahoo currently offers "stupid".