Yahoo News & Articles

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Social Networks Continue To Draw More Visitors
• Yahoo Signs Partnership to Integrate with Twitter
• Betty White Has a Shot at SNL, Because of Facebook Fans
• Twitter Passes MySpace For Number of Status Updates

Microsoft  (news, site) and Yahoo! (news, site) have been given the final approval by the EU to go ahead with a partnership that was agreed to last July. That partnership will see Yahoo’s search results being powered by Microsoft Bing for a cut of the ad revenues.

The deal has also been agreed to by US regulators without any conditions seeing the two take control of 30% of the search market -- the other 70% of which is controlled by Google.

A joint statement by the companies said: "While Microsoft will provide the underlying platform, both companies will continue to create different, compelling and evolving experiences, competing for audience, engagement and clicks."

By combining the two, Yahoo! will take over the search advertising work of Microsoft saving them the cost of running huge spidering centers, while Bing will provide all the links for every Yahoo search.

Like all such deals at the moment, the original agreement announced last summer is designed to cut costs for both companies and increase revenue share, which should see some improvement as the combined networks should be considerably more attractive to advertisers than they would be operating on their own.

Microsoft and Yahoo will begin the transition of algorithmic search and have set a goal of completing that effort in at least the United States by the end of 2010.

The companies also said they hope to make significant progress transitioning U.S. advertisers and publishers prior to the 2010 holiday season, but may wait until 2011 if they determine that the transition will be more effective after the holiday season.

All global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.
 

Big G recently tacked on more enterprise goodies to Google Analytics. The seven new additions boost existing capabilities as well as introduce new customization flexibility.

Google is so quick to fire out similar solutions after a rival has, we’re beginning to wonder if this is some sort of game they just play for fun. Maybe they have a stockpile of them somewhere, labeled and ready to go? Who knows. What we do know is that less than a day after Facebook announced their linkup with Facebook Connect and Yahoo, Google busted out with a trendy integration of its own.

If you use Google’s Friend Connect site, you now have the option to log in with your Google or Twitter credentials. This means you can login to any of the nine million sites that utilize Friend Connect and, if you have a Twitter account, can tweet new memberships with friends, interesting content etc., with just a click. See here:

Facebook has made a name for itself, and has managed to touch almost every corner of the Web with the Facebook Connect feature. That level of success mixed with a company as large as Yahoo is certainly a recipe for a favorable outcome, but Google and Twitter are giant giants as well. What we're seeing is a war for the Web, no doubt, but whose pool of power will reign supreme? It's hard to say. 

Right now, the numbers tell us that the Facebook/Yahoo duo has the advantage, thanks to the social platform's massive amount of users (somewhere around 350 million). But then again, Twitter's simple mission took the Internet by storm, and is now so ubiquitous that it's odd to think there are people and companies out there that haven't signed up. 

In any event, the battle for the throne will be an interesting one to watch. 

Microsoft has opened up 5 of their Web Specifications as part of the Open Web Foundation's new legal framework agreement

Yahoo's customer is the advertiser. Google's customer is you and me. That's why Google has been more successful.

Tired of using archaic Notepad? Google Squared too complicated or time consuming? Try Yahoo! Search Pad.

Yahoo! (news, site) released their new tool to the public earlier this week. A search and note taking mashup designed to follow your train of thought, Search Pad is like your own personal, mind-reading assistant.
 

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Facebook Verified App Directory Now Live
• Flock is Updated With More Support for Twitter, Other Services
• Facebook Accepts OpenID
• Should You Switch Back To Yahoo! For Search?

Yahoo! turned on support for deep links and images from Wikipedia and a select few other modules. This lurch toward enhanced search results is part of Yahoo!’s effort to lead the search market and allow structured data from third parties using the SearchMonkey platform. What will this mean for your site? More work.

Social Media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here's the week's top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• Searchmonkey and the Future of Wikipedia
• Unwrapp-- Follow Web App Updates
• Retweetist = Digg for Twitter
• Networks Get Social Media-Savvy for Obama's Big Day
• Twitter Updates, Adds Suggestions

Searchmonkey and the Future of Wikipedia

Wikipedia celebrated its 8th birthday last week, and ReadWriteWeb took the opportunity to look at what new technologies are being brought to bear to keep the online encyclopedia top of the pile.

Perhaps the biggest deal of the lot is one which comes not from Wikipedia itself, but from Yahoo!. It's SearchMonkey Wikipedia application went live last week, and integrates Wikipedia articles with Yahoo! search results. SearchMonkey is a development platform built by Yahoo! which allows open access to search data, and enables developers to roll their own search applications (check out our previous coverage). You should see the results of this monster mashup in action right away in your Yahoo! SERPs : it's turned on as default for users of Yahoo! search.

Apart from the new Yahoo! integration, Wikipedia plans to vastly increase media storage space, and to build in-site integration with 3rd party media sites like Flickr. This new focus on multimedia archiving makes eminent sense for the organization. If it succeeds in becoming the, er, Wikipedia for video and other media apart from plain text, there's no telling what kind of traffic volume it can expect in the medium term. Expect the next donations drive to be aiming for a multiple of those of the past to pay for all the new servers needed.

 

In these days nearly every tech company is seeking the holy grail of new services, software, SaaS options or enterprise 2.0 solutions. The organizations want to get that edge they may need to hold their ground.

However, it seems a little odd that anyone would think that another webmail client is really what we need. MySpace seems to think this is the case, and has a stealth webmail client in the works as their newest 1-2 punch.

Social Media moves so fast, its hard to keep up. Here’s the week’s top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• Yahoo Glue Comes to the US
• Using Tarpipe to Unclog the Social Media Pipe
• Google’s Getting a SearchWiki
• Get Yer Free Blog on TypePad

New Apatar Connector was recently released to aid those struggling with integration of open source suite SugarCRM with third-party applications, databases, flat files, other CRM/ERP applications and Web 2.0 destinations.

Apatar claims to be able to do it all “without coding.”

What do you do in turbulent economic times? Downsize or produce more? Yahoo! chooses the latter and attempts to re-incarnate itself and “make history again” with the release of its Open Strategy (Y!OS) platform.

The idea behind this initiative is to open up to developers and let them “tap into benefits once only available within Yahoo!” Yahoo! has opened quite a few features, including content, traffic and Yahoo’s user base.

Yahoo!, the struggling Internet giant, has managed to complete its latest product: Yahoo! Web Analytics. While the name is uninspiring, the product actually looks like it has some potential. If anything, it has a sexy look and feel to it.

With this being a “controlled access launch,” not everyone interested in trying the new product will be able to do so. Hence, Google Analytics doesn’t have to worry. At least not yet.