Some very nice Yahoo executives came by the FT bureau in San Francisco this afternoon to remind us that they have a search strategy and that they are still planning to integrate Facebook and Twitter activity so that Yahoo users can see what their friends and relations are doing without leaving the land of purple.
In the next couple of weeks, they said, Yahoo will start showing you when people in your Yahoo address book comment on Yahoo News stories (some 60,000 did that on a single Mississippi prom-related piece a while back), rate a song or movie, or otherwise interact with bits of Yahoo content.
Sometime in the second quarter, what your Facebook friends are doing will be added, and not long after that, ditto for Twitter. The executives were fuzzy on whether Facebook’s new universal “Like” button will show up in Yahoo’s feeds, which only serves to point up how much faster and further the social network is moving.
All of Yahoo’s moves make sense, of course. With a pretty small investment, it can keep people on its pages for longer, get them more engaged, and draw new people in by broadcasting the activity of willing participants.
Combined with expense cuts, there’s no reason Yahoo can’t make a go of being a smaller but profitable amalgam of Web activities. Oh and of course, including social behaviour can improve non-algorithmic search results, where Yahoo will continue to compete with Microsoft after it begins taking Redmond’s automated search links.
It’s just that it all seems both sort of unambitious, even obvious, and a tad familiar.
From a previous FT article, citing a then-head of Yahoo search: “There is a lot more knowledge in the world to be gained…Social search has that power by virtue of tapping untapped authority and expanding the sources of relevancy.”
The date on that article is May 16, 2006, four months before Facebook opened its doors to all non-students.
