Yahoo! Live Makes Webcasting the Next Big Thing for Gen Y

One of the big stories today on the social news site digg.com is the new Yahoo! Live service.

Fast forward to 2008 and we see this new service put together by Yahoo!. We now have the infrastructure to support video streaming, and YouTube and other video sharing sites has been exploiting that for some time. Yahoo! has decided to take out the lag time between capture and connect by allowing users to broadcast themselves live to whoever is out there to view.

We've pondered here on Gen Y Voodoo whether people will pay to put themselves out there - a dollar to rise to the top of a social network. That may not work as well in the US because we want to see instant gratification - and that is what Yahoo! Live provides.

Anyone can open up their Webcam-equipped MacBook and broadcast for a half an hour between classes and make new friends, or just be goofy. They can create their own channel (a la YouTube) and even pull a regular audience with a simple url: live.yahoo.com/username. Niche groups can even recapture the synchronous qualities of television that we have all lost to bring people together at a set time to learn and interact about things that they love.

In the minutes that I spent checking it out today, I played rock, paper, scissors with a guy in Korea who was wrapped in what appeared to be toilet paper (some people will do anything for attention) and attempted to communicate with a kitty who somehow figured out how to use a webcam (he didn't respond however, he must not have mastered the keyboard yet). Did I mention niche audiences?

With the opportunity to embed these feeds, it opens up a lot of opportunities. Did you ever expect to go to someone's MySpace page and actually see them hanging out - live? I can't wait to see what other opportunities sprout from this and what will be developed when Google tries to one-up this service.