Yahoo! unveils plans for new social and local service at Web 2.0 Summit
One of the longest standing web giants
Yahoo! has unveiled a host a range of product and content offerings with social media and localization at the core.
The announcement, which came at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday, says that the improved products will deliver Yahoo! customers a more personally relevant web experience. Updates include integration of micro-blogging service
Twitter and social gaming company
Zynga across the entire Yahoo! platform, the roll out of Yahoo! Messenger Beta with social features, the launch of Local Offers program and new local search applications that come into play directly from the search results page.
Yahoo!?s executive vice president and chief product officer Blake Irving comments, ?Our job is to connect you with the people, places and things that matter most to you ? whether that?s making a restaurant reservation, finding a discounted tee time, or playing popular online games with friends. By enhancing Yahoo!?s most popular sites and services with social experiences like Zynga and Twitter, great local content, and a new platform for sharing your voice with the world, we?re making Yahoo! an event better place for everyone to stay entertained, productive and informed.?
Yahoo! Messenger has been vamped up with game integration from three game publishers, ELEX, OMGPOP and Xynga who are the makers of two of Facebook?s most popular games, Farmville and Mafia Wars. Users will be able to set their ?status? across various social platforms and view, comment and ?like? updates from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Yahoo! Pulse without leaving the Messenger client.
The Yahoo! Contributor Network is an additional platform the company has launched, which enables people to publish their creative content across the Yahoo! network, which will bring together content from over 400,000 creators.
The company is also looking to grow in the localization arena, by launching Local Offers, a program where businesses can offer a selection of deals, coupons and other offers from to local customers. Local Offers works in partnership with existing local deal companies including
Groupon,
LivingSocial and
Gilt City.
The announcement of Local Offers and increased social capability comes just days after Yahoo! chief executive officer Carol Bartz?s commented on stage at the Web 2.0 summit that
Facebook is direct competition to Yahoo! Within the last few days, Facebook has announced the launch of it?s own local deals initiative with
Deals and its next generation email, SMS and communication platform named
Messages.
Read more