The world of social media seems to be getting smaller and smaller, and in an effort to consolidate networking outlets, Yahoo! announced Tuesday a partnership with Twitter to integrate the microblogging site's feeds into its various online properties.
The deal means that Yahoo!'s more than 600 million users around the world will now be able to update all of their social networks in one simple step. For example, anyone with a Yahoo! ID can check their e-mail and news and also access and update their Twitter feeds through any one of these channels, which allows them to stay even more up-to-the-date with both information and people.
Yahoo! users can now see real-time public Twitter updates on a variety of topics while browsing Yahoo's news, finance, sports and entertainment sites, something Yahoo says will "drive deeper user engagement and create new and compelling opportunities for developers, advertisers and publishers."
For Twitter, the Yahoo partnership will expand the reach of its real time updates and demonstrate the value of its service in new settings.
"The information in one single tweet can travel light-years farther with this Yahoo! integration," Twitter cofounder Biz Stone said in a Tuesday blog post. "Tweets in more places brings relevance where and when you need it most."
Yahoo will also have access to the Twitter service known as "Firehose," which is "a full feed of public tweets sent to Twitter and our partners every second of every day from all around the world," Stone wrote in the blog post.
Yahoo!'s decision to jump aboard the social media bandwagon makes sense in light of the company's push to make Internet users' experience more personally relevant. Yahoo recently added a Facebook tab on its homepage, and its latest ad campaign, which features the tagline "Now the Internet has a personality. Yours", now seems like a foreshadowing of its move into social networking.
