If you’re a social media news watcher, you will know about the recent Yahoo Twitter Partnership. In essense, here’s what’s happening – either right now, or very soon:
* People will be able to access their personal Twitter feeds across Yahoo!’s many products and properties, including the homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and others, letting them check in more easily on what’s happening with the people and things they care about while on Yahoo!.
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People will be able to update their Twitter status and share content from Yahoo! in their Twitter stream, so they can easily share their Yahoo! experiences with their friends and followers on Twitter.
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Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! media properties like News, Finance, Entertainment, and Sports will include real-time public Twitter updates across a variety of topics. Yahoo! Search users will immediately see real-time Twitter results today; go to Yahoo! and try it out.
The Yahoo press release goes on to say that the partnership:
"…lets people bring together and unify their activity from their many social experiences across the Web. Because of these connections, anyone with a Yahoo! ID can update multiple social networks simultaneously and stay in touch with the people and information that matter most at every moment of the day."
In other words, what you might already do with Posterous, PixelPipe, Ping.fm or many of the other communication mashup tools, as a Yahoo user, you can now do under the Yahoo umbrella instead.
The REAL purpose behind this partnership, however is revealed here:
"…This will drive deeper user engagement, and create new and compelling opportunities for developers, advertisers, and publishers."
In other words, Yahoo is developing an integrated and demographically targeted advertising platform, which uses Twitter as part of the Social Media mix. If you’re thinking that this is beginning to sound a bit like FaceBook, then you’re right.
No doubt Yahoo wants a slice of the revenue from the advertising cake which FaceBook currently dominates, and ultimately it would want to position itself at the top of the pile in terms of the go-to place for this kind of close integration between companies and clients.
The major challenge for Yahoo will be to be roll this out across the complete "socialosphere" to the extent that their services become sufficiently embedded that they eventually become the natural place for businesses to gravitate towards.
Yahoo is under no illusions that FaceBook and other big players present it with a challenge, but the partnership with Twitter is but one of many integrations Yahoo seeks to play its part in the communication revolution that is now in full swing.