Skip to main content

Yahoo to Tighten Facebook Integration

yahoo-logo
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Yahoo and social networking giant Facebook have announced they’re deepening the integration of their services, with Facebook features getting promoted right to Yahoo’s front page. Yahoo’s Facebook Connect offering will enable Facebook users to tap into their streams—real-time updates from a users’ friends and contacts—and update their status right from the Yahoo home page. Yahoo will also be expanding Facebook capabilities in other Yahoo properties, like Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Sports.

“With this integration, we are opening the door for two of the Internet’s largest online communities to make it easier for people to stay connected,” said Yahoo Communities VP Jim Stoneham, in a statement. “It also enables us to further the Yahoo Open Strategy, which is aimed at making experiences dramatically more open, social, and personally relevant for the more than 500 million people that visit Yahoo each month.”

Users looking for these new features will have to wait a bit, however: the new features are expected to begin popping up only during the first half of 2010. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The benefits of the dea to Facebook are reasonably clear: it gets deep integration in some of Yahoo’s top-drawing services; for Yahoo, the benefits are slightly more indirect: when users shore content from Yahoo sites and services with their Facebook buddies, they “create a loop” that leads back to Yahoo services. That in turn means more eyeballs on Yahoo, and that means more ad sales.

It’s not clear whether Yahoo’s recent long-term tie-up with Microsoft had any influence on deepening Facebook integration: Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook for some $240 million back in 2007, which has seen Facebook integrate Microsoft services such as Microsoft Live Search directly into its platform.

Editors' Recommendations

Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
Meta is building a space-age ‘universal language translator’
A silhouetted person holds a smartphone displaying the Facebook logo. They are standing in front of a sign showing the Meta logo.

When you think of tools infused with artificial intelligence (AI) these days, it’s natural for ChatGPT and Bing Chat to spring to mind. But Facebook owner Meta wants to change that with SeamlessM4T, an AI-powered “universal language translator” that could instantly convert any language in the world into whatever output you want.

Meta describes SeamlessM4T as “the first all-in-one multilingual multimodal AI translation and transcription model.” That’s quite a mouthful, but in simple terms, it means it can convert languages in a range of different ways, such as taking speech audio and switching it into text in a different tongue.

Read more
Why I gave up selling tech on Facebook Marketplace
Lenovo Legion Tower 7i gaming PC sitting on a table.

I moved to a new house a few weeks ago, and as part of the preparations I decided to sell a few old bits of tech that had been lying around unloved and unused in my old apartment. There was a MacBook Pro from 2015 and a gaming PC I built the year after, and the logical place to cash in on them seemed to be Facebook Marketplace. Big mistake.

Have you ever tried selling tech on Facebook Marketplace? Maybe an old forgotten phone, or a pair of underused headphones? If so, you might have had the same awful experience I did. If not, I’m advising you to stay well away.

Read more
ChatGPT may soon moderate illegal content on sites like Facebook
A laptop screen shows the home page for ChatGPT, OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot.

GPT-4 -- the large language model (LLM) that powers ChatGPT Plus -- may soon take on a new role as an online moderator, policing forums and social networks for nefarious content that shouldn’t see the light of day. That’s according to a new blog post from ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which says this could offer “a more positive vision of the future of digital platforms.”

By enlisting artificial intelligence (AI) instead of human moderators, OpenAI says GPT-4 can enact “much faster iteration on policy changes, reducing the cycle from months to hours.” As well as that, “GPT-4 is also able to interpret rules and nuances in long content policy documentation and adapt instantly to policy updates, resulting in more consistent labeling,” OpenAI claims.

Read more