Yahoo, Twitter to boost up social features
Friday, 26 February 2010, 15:00 IST   |    1 Comments
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Yahoo, Twitter to boost up social features
San Francisco: Seeking to augment the appeal of its online properties with popular social networking features, Yahoo plans to integrate Twitter into its collection of websites. The partnership will allow web surfers to view the short, 140-character messages created by Twitter users, dubbed Tweets, directly within Yahoo sites as well as to publish their own Twitter messages without leaving Yahoo, reports Alexei Oreskovic from Reuters. Yahoo also plans to display a live stream of Tweets within other online properties including its email service and sites devoted to sports, entertainment and finance later this year. The move, which Yahoo announced late on Tuesday, comes a couple of months after Yahoo announced a similar deal with Facebook, the world's No.1 social networking site. In January, Facebook overtook Yahoo to become the second most visited website in the United States, according to a recent report by web analytics firm Compete. A separate study by comScore showed Yahoo maintaining its No.2 rank with roughly 164 million unique U.S. visitors, while Facebook was the No.4 site with 112 visitors, behind third-ranked Microsoft. Yahoo said its Internet search engine results will display up-to-the-second Tweets about various topics, matching the so-called "real time search" capabilities that Google and Microsoft announced in their own respective deals with Twitter last year. Yahoo executives said that the company was looking at ways to make Twitter messages relevant to each property, such as by customizing the selection of messages that appear alongside an article about a particular sporting event, for example. "We believe that the content and context side of things is very unique," Yahoo Vice President of Communities Jim Stoneham told Reuters. However, Yahoo would not comment on any financial terms involved in the deal with Twitter.

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