DNS - Yahoo Now

So Yahoo will now provide integrated Twitter results into its search engine, and has “laid out a brief roadmap for further Twitter integration across the company’s network of Web sites.”

 

According to PCWorld, it’s all part of Yahoo’s open strategy announced in 2008 – “Yahoo hopes it will help make the new Yahoo homepage and Yahoo Mail an integral part of users’ daily Internet activity.”

 

Or as industry observer Sharon Gaudin says trenchantly, it “could prove timely for an Internet pioneer looking to regain lost momentum and join the social networking glitterati.”

So, um, Yahoo Meme is dead, then?

 

So how’s this different from what Google (News - Alert) and Bing are doing? PCWorld says “Yahoo only displays two tweets at a time, but also displays two YouTube video links that have been extracted from relevant tweets.”

 

Google constantly updates relevant tweets within your search results, the magazine said, noting that while Bing places very few links to Twitter within its search results, it “offers a dedicated Twitter page at Bing.com/twitter.”

 

Gaudin quotes Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, saying that maybe this is the direction Yahoo should have taken all along. “Social networking, rather than search, was closer to Yahoo’s initial strength, and they lost their way by going after Google. This takes them back to their roots.”

 

Ironically, back in May 2009, ReadWriteWeb reported that: “A few weeks ago, we heard that Yahoo was readying a Portuguese-only Twitter clone under the name Yahoo Meme. Today, we finally got our invitation to try this new service, and while it is indeed an interesting micro-blogging service, we wouldn’t go as far as calling it a Twitter killer.”

 

Instead of cloning Twitter’s communications features like @ replies and direct messages, ReadWriteWeb wrote at the time, “Meme goes back to the basics of micro-blogging. Users can upload photos and post text (without a 140 character limit), YouTube (News - Alert) videos (just copy and paste the URL), and links to MP3 files.”

 

Yahoo will also be incorporating a mini-Twitter client into its sites, including the Yahoo Homepage, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, PCWorld said: “The company wasn’t exactly clear on how this will work, but from the sound of it, your Twitter feed will stay with you as you visit select Yahoo sites whenever you are logged in to your Yahoo account.”