WomenCo.

Men are from Google, Women are from Yahoo?

are women the driving force behind social media?

Today marks the launch date of Shine (shine.yahoo.com), Yahoo’s new attempt to win over the hearts and minds of e-women everywhere – at least, between the ages of 24 and 54. Therefore, today also marks the trillionth attempt for a larger internet company to attempt to shift demographics in order to cover women’s media and women’s news.

If you take a closer look at this trend, one way or another, you’ll run into an interested concept: namely, that women’s media is becoming increasingly central to the success of the mammoth internet companies. Think about it – iVillage, Jezebel (part of the Gawker network), Yahoo Shine, Glam Media, and Sugar Inc – which is actually comprised of 15+ smaller sites serving women’s niche-specific interests. What is really going on here?

We’ve known for a long time that men and women spend their time differently online (there is perhaps even a physical element of this) – but we’ve never seen these differences targeted so strongly by different companies as we do today.

Without wanting to perpetuate raucous claims, it seems to me that many internet gurus are drawing the same conclusion: women are actually the driving force behind social media. Summation blogger Auren Hoffman writes:

If you are creating a new Web 2.0 site and you want to go viral, you target women. Young women drive virality and so all the new innovation is targeted towards them. That means that the gender gap on social networks (and increasingly in all of social media) is only going to widen. More and more innovation will be targeted towards women and they will continue to get more engaged. And while we expect men’s adoption to social media to continue to increase, it will likely be slower than the rate of adoption by women.

If this turns out to be true, there would be some pretty interesting implications: There is, of course, potential for the focus on women’s issues to actually empower women. If women’s interests and motivators become a priority for these companies, and women’s interests continue to shift from astrology to demands for equal wages and third-wave feminism, some of these companies would be put in a slightly awkward situation.

But it is equally as likely that large companies will begin to quibble over coverage of women’s issues in an entirely cut-throat and unprofessional fashion. Already in my work on WomenCo., I have seen a great deal of catty behavior; just last week, I was contacted by a competitor site that re-posted several WomenCo. articles after stripping out all of the links to our community and our bloggers. Such transgressions can waste a good deal of time – the larger the site, the more likely lawyers will get involved.

In today’s times, it is very surprising to see Yahoo! launching a product like Shine without Google nipping at their heels. Will we see a fierce competition form between the two companies – or will Google release a product which tries to engage a more male-focused group?

Yahoo’s own comments are very interesting: “When we started talking about creating a new website for women, we wanted to avoid all of the common categories that advertisers or marketers tend to put us in. We didn’t want to be a site just for moms or just for single women or working women, or any specific demo- or psychographic.“

Yahoo plans to let Shine visitors write blog posts, and the editors will feature some of the best on the home page.

And yet, when I got to the home page of Shine, I immediately see the following tag words: “Fashion, Beauty, Living, Entertainment, Parenting, Love, Sex, Money, Work, Food, Home, Astrology”.

I guess, in the end, it always circles back to What Women Want. Apparently, Yahoo’s best guess is Kate Bosworth.