Now Tweet Using Yahoo Services

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.

You will now be able to access your personal Twitter feeds across Yahoo's products and properties, including the homepage, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports and others.

The Internet giant has joined hands with the micro blogging website to bring real-time Twitter content on Yahoo services like Profiles, Search etc. The best part here is that all Yahoo Account holders would be able to send Twitter updates without leaving the respective Yahoo services. For example, users would be able to view and reply to Twitter updates from Yahoo Mail itself.

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 Twitter integration deal comprises of three key areas:

Access Twitter feeds from anywhere in Yahoo:
People will be able to access their Tweets 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.

Send Twitter updates from Yahoo:
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.

Real-time public Twitter updates in Search and other Media properties
Yahoo Search, News, Finance, Entertainment and Sports wills how real-time public Twitter updates across myriad topics.

Last August 2009, Yahoo announced integration of Social features in its Mail, Messenger and Search. This is yet another big day for Yahoo after its search deal with Microsoft got green signal last week. With this content-sharing partnership, Yahoo has leapfrogged Google and Microsoft's integration of Twitter in their Internet search only. We can now say that Yahoo has responded to Google Buzz in a different manner altogether.

Yahoo Users Take Control of Ads

Yahoo! released a beta version of a tool today (Ad Interest Manager) which enables consumers to see a summary of their online activity (interest areas) and make choices about their exposure to interest-based (read behavioral) advertising served from the Yahoo! Ad Network.

In addition to Ad Interest Manager showing users both Yahoo!'s educated guesses about their interests and a summary of those observations, the tool also provides a list of interest categories that Yahoo! has placed a user into and lets people turn those categories off (or opt out of interest-based ads entirely).



“Ads tailored to users’ interests make online experiences more compelling and user-focused, and the new tool Yahoo! is launching today will provide transparency into how Yahoo!’s interest-based advertising works,” said Yahoo! Vice President of Policy and Head of Privacy, Anne Toth.

Ad Interest Manager will clearly have an effect on display advertisers as well - the effect (good or bad) however is yet unknown. I would expect that through better targeting though, both groups will benefit from the offering.

“Yahoo! has long provided its users with products and services for free, thanks to a business model based almost entirely on advertising, and we’ve found that consumers are more likely to click on advertising that speaks directly to them and their interests,” said Yahoo! Vice President and General Manager of Display Advertising, David Zinman. “With the introduction of Ad Interest Manager, users can not only get a better understanding of how the process works, but they can also communicate better with Yahoo! and our advertisers about what most interests them.”

Source: http://www.websitemagazine.com

Hired gun for Microsoft, in dogged pursuit of Google

REDMOND, Wash.--Qi Lu knows as well as anyone just how difficult it is to take on Google.

For nearly a decade, Lu played a leading role in building Yahoo's Internet search and advertising technologies. The effort was so important that Yahoo backed it with billions of dollars to acquire companies, hire armies of engineers and develop and run its own systems. Yet Yahoo fell further and further behind and many analysts said the company was simply outgunned by Google.

Lu, who is 47, left Yahoo 14 months ago but now finds himself once again leading the charge against Google. This time, he is backed by a patron that vows to spend even more than Yahoo did on the mission: Microsoft.

"It's an unfinished mission that I would like to work on," he said.

The challenge for Lu and his team remains enormous, and success appears improbable. But since Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, tapped him to become president of the company's online services division in December, Lu, a self-effacing engineer who is one of the most private and atypical executives in the upper ranks of the Internet industry, has earned the confidence of Microsoft's troops and helped to bring a dose of optimism to a beaten-down team.

Possessing unusual stamina and a maniacal work ethic, he has pushed his team hard to give Microsoft an important victory. In nightly 9:30 meetings over several weeks, he leaned on his managers to find creative ways to structure a sweeping and complex partnership with Yahoo. The deal, signed in July, will give Microsoft something it has coveted for years: a vastly larger audience that will make Bing, its search engine, the runner-up to Google.

By Miguel Helft [VIA:The New York Times ]

Also Read On :http://news.cnet.com/

Google Yahoo or Bing: Apps

Google Yahoo and Bing fight for the top three spots for search engines. Apps are very important features for many users. Each of these three giants have focused differently on the subject at hand…apps.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the three most used search engines on the internet. Each one has apps which we use to make our (online) life more enjoyable and more productive. The apps which we enjoy so much are developed in order to appease the appetites of the internet world for more techno-advancements.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing all use their apps to attract new users in order to garner higher usage, thus getting higher ranking and pay for their services and goods. Let’s take a look at some of the individual apps that Google, Yahoo, and Bing have in their portfolios.

Google’s apps are very useful, indeed. For starters, Google calendars is a great way to keep track of the events in your life. You can also use the calendar to update your friends as to what is going on in your life.

This is can be very beneficial for someone who is on the go! When people have a difficult time following what you are up to in your busy world, they can receive updates via the web! You won’t have to answer so many questions like, “where have you been?” A simple, bur rewarding feature to Google’s apps list.

Yahoo has an app called Daily activities planner, which is similar to Google’s calendar, yet more customizable as it has many templates one can use to make their daily grind more enjoyable to update. Bing’s apps are pretty much limited as of yet. I believe this an attempt to streamline in order to produce a more useful search engine.

Cutting the fat may have allowed for more focus on the search engine’s capabilities for search. Of course MSN has apps as well, but this is a discussion of the top three search engines apps, so we’ll stick with the discussion.

Next up is email platforms.Google’s email platform is used by more advertisers (spammers) because it seems to get passed the spam guards more easily. It also seems that there are more options for those with slow connections or weak computers. One can load only in basic HTML if the connection seems to have trouble loading.

This is great for someone such as myself with lack of computing power. Yahoo’s mail services, both plus and classic seem to load very slowly and take quite a bit of resources for the slow computer.Multitasking can be a pain while trying to utilize Yahoo mail at the same time.

The features offered are well put together, though. It is a more navigable environment than Gmail once inside. Bing uses Windows live or hotmail as their platform for email service. There are several extensions which makes this engine a great place to setup throwaway accounts and I for one just found passwords for a mail account that I have not opened for at least four years.

There were over 8, 500 emails in the inbox, but the account was still functioning! I was amazed. I guess reliability is not a problem with Microsoft’s email platform.

[Via:http://webupon.com/search-engines/google-yahoo-or-bing-apps/]