Yahoo integrates Facebook on its sites

By siliconindia   |   Monday, 07 June 2010, 21:59 IST   |    2 Comments
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Yahoo integrates Facebook on its sites
San Francisco: As part of bringing the best social experiences from across the Web to its customers across the globe, Yahoo has joined hands with Facebook to share their accounts to view and share updates on both websites. The personal updates, known as a "news feed" in Facebook's parlance, will be available throughout Yahoo's website, including its front page and e-mail service, reports Michael Liedtke of Associated Press. Other tools will allow users to automatically let their Facebook friends know about their activities on Facebook and Yahoo services like its photo sharing site, Flickr. The extra tie-ins are in connection with Yahoo's effort to make the website more influential. Even if Yahoo commands worldwide internet users of around 600 million, people have been hanging around for progressively shorter periods during the past few years. One of the reasons is because people increasingly congregate on Facebook to share photos, video clips and music, discuss current events and bond with their families and friends. "More and more, people rely on social sites to share and discover information that matters to them, making Yahoo! uniquely positioned to provide people with all of the mainstream methods of content discovery-social, search, communications, and editorial. Starting with Facebook, we are bringing all of these elements together to give people," said Cody Simms, Senior Director of Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN) at Yahoo. Yahoo claims that more of its visitors will stay on its website if they can simultaneously monitor what's happening on Facebook. Keeping people on its site longer would give Yahoo more opportunities to sell online ads and revive its revenue growth after an extended slump that has sapped its earnings power and stock price. Later this summer, Yahoo intends to import personal updates posted on Twitter's short-messaging service. And by the end of the year, Yahoo will begin featuring widely played Internet games such as "Farmville," "Mafia Wars" and "Fishville," developed by Zynga. The new alliance with Facebook is the latest example of Yahoo's growing reliance on partnerships since the company hired Silicon Valley veteran Carol Bartz 17 months ago. Yahoo's search engine is in the process of adopting Microsoft Corp.'s technology. And the company recently decided to rely on IAC/InterActiveCorp.'s Match.com as its online dating service.