Making friends that influence people

Facebook and Yahoo! announced a new deal today that will give users of both services the ability to share their activities, comments, news and more. The partnership will be available to users in the early part of 2010.Facebook and Yahoo! already have a deal which allows Yahoo! users to share certain items of content on Facebook and Facebook users can view limited information from their page on the Yahoo! portal.
So what will Yahoo and Facebook gain from this new arrangement? Back in March of this year Yahoo took on Facebook’s Connect application in the form of Yahoo Updates, developed in partnership with widget provider JS-Kit, and have endeavored to produce other applications to directly compete with Facebook’s wide array of applications. Yahoo! has been fighting difficult times over the last 18 months with closures of both Yahoo 360 and Yahoo Mash.
As far back as 2006 Yahoo! tried to buy a stake in the social networking market with a bid for Facebook which was rejected by founder Mark Zuckerberg. Now Yahoo! has adopted a strong strategy of partnering with their former competitors by integrating with companies such as Facebook to capture space in the growing social media marketplace.
Early 2010 will see Yahoo users’ able login to Yahoo products such as Flickr, News, and Sports via their Facebook accounts and Yahoo! believe that this will enhance the users’ experience. The Facebook Connect application which allows user to connect to other non-Facebook web sites via a secure Facebook ID and then add those interactions to the rest of your Facebook activities will be integrated into Yahoo! services giving allowing user to feed the information to both Yahoo friends and connections.
Insiders view this new deal as a win/ win situation for both Yahoo and Facebook with Yahoo attracting newer users to their aging portal while also increasing awareness of Yahoo products and Facebook get to increase traffic to the one of the world’s fastest growing communities which includes over 350 million users. The future of this partnership may grow even further but both Yahoo and Facebook are remaining tip lipped in regards to further integration. Jim Stoneham, VP for communities at Yahoo described the agreement as a “very deep long-term partnership.”
We look forward to yelling Yahoo! more often as this interesting partnership continues.