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Yahoo Gets Up Close And Personal With Facebook, Launches Integration Smorgasbord

Yahoo Gets Up Close And Personal With Facebook, Launches Integration Smorgasbord

Yahoo LogoYahoo today rolled out a new series of Facebook integrations across various Yahoo services including the companies homepage and Yahoo Mail service.  The announcement moves the company one step closer to being a major playing in the social networking aggregation field. The search portal also announced a fresh new look for Yahoo Pulse profiles, although the changes at Pulse.yahoo.com have yet to be made live.

In a Press Release, Cody Simms, Yahoo’s senior director of Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network Guru said that Yahoo has made their recent changes in an attempt to ensure Yahoo is:

“uniquely positioned to provide people with all of the mainstream methods of content discovery – social, search, communications, and editorial,”

The statement comes at a time when Yahoo is desperately in need of a focus for the companies properties, focus that has recently emerged as they have worked to gain momentum in the social networking field, signing a 5 year deal with Zynga (makers of Facebook favorites Farmville and Mafia Wars) and announcing various other partnerships.

Creating A Larger Aggregation Offering

Yahoo already aggregates news, now they can add social networks to their portfolio, while still providing enough incentive for their users to remain on their own properties.

As Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb points out, the service adds a nice new partner for already available services:

Facebook now joins Yahoo’s own “Buzz” network (a Digg clone for voting up news stories), Twitter and Flickr, the latter a Yahoo-owned property, in the list of social sites that can be added as “favorites” to the homepage.

Streamlined Social Networking For “Less Technology Savvy” Users

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The new services gives “everyday users” who don’t really understand RSS readers and other “follow” technologies the ability to organize all of their social networking sites in a simple to find area. It should be noted that the new Facebook option launches in a new mini-window, much like Yahoo News and other Yahoo integrated services.

Yahoo apparently isn’t just happy providing some Facebook love on their homepages and via email, they also feature integration on Yahoo’s Entertainment channels, Sports networks, via Flicker and through various other popular outlets owned by the company. It’s a smart strategic move for Yahoo as their Facebook visitors can now post Facebook wall updates, add info to their news feeds and perform other Facebook profile linking options which in turn should help Yahoo’s site numbers.

Yahoo Social Networking Dashboard

The most promising part of the integration in my opinion is a centralized dashboard in which Yahoo allows their users to manage all of their social networking accounts. The dashboard, to be found at pulse.yahoo.com allows users to update, link to and manage all of their currently compatible social media networks.

What do you think about Yahoo’s newest integration moves? Personally I can’t wait to see how much further they take integration options. If Facebook is my one stop spot for checking up on friends and updating my status, Yahoo could very well become the site I use to circumvent Facebook while still getting my daily dose of Sports, Entertainment and General News.

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