Yahoo!’s Partnership with Twitter

Today Yahoo! announced a partnership with Twitter which includes integrating Twitter content and social features across the Yahoo! network.

Public Tweets are already available in Yahoo! search results and you will see them appear more frequently, for more of your queries. Soon you will see topics in Yahoo! News, Finance, Sports and Entertainment enhanced with relevant real-time Tweets.

A key driver for this Twitter partnership is to enable Yahoo! users to share and stay connected more easily with the people and things they care about across the web, in keeping with our Yahoo! Open Strategy and platform. We announced the first phase of this Social Aggregation Strategy back in December when we outlined our plans to implement Facebook Connect on Yahoo!. Adding Twitter to our users’ experiences is the next phase in this strategy and it further expands the power of the Yahoo! ID as a single key that gives our users an access token to the best of the web. Whether they want to check their email, consume media, comment and participate in communities, or follow their Facebook newsfeed and Twitter stream, they can now do all of those things through Yahoo!.

Here are some implementation details of our social integration with Twitter:

View Personal Twitter Feeds in Yahoo! Mail

Users who authorize Yahoo! will be able to read and update their Twitter feed from Yahoo! Mail, the Yahoo! homepage, and other locations across the Yahoo! network.

The Twitter (and Facebook) feeds will be important additions to the rich, diverse Updates feed that Yahoo! users already enjoy. Our users share Updates with each other from over 80 Yahoo sites globally, as well through Yahoo!-powered social experiences on sites like the Huffington Post and tens of thousands of others. Our APIs and partner services like ShareThis, Gigya, Echo (formerly JS-Kit), and JanRain make it easy for anyone to add social components to their website and send user updates to Yahoo!. We have recently expanded the distribution of Updates to more places on the Yahoo! network – Homepage, Mail, Instant Messenger, Sports, News and others. With this increase in distribution, Yahoo! is on track to generate billions of “social referrals” in 2010. If you are an application developer and want to publish your user activities to the Yahoo! Updates stream and benefit from our massive global distribution (more than 600 million monthly unique visitors), check out the Yahoo! Updates API.

Tweet from the Yahoo! Homepage

With our Twitter integration, Yahoo users will also be able to update their Twitter (and Facebook) status from the Yahoo! Homepage and from Yahoo! Mail.

Activities that users currently share via Yahoo! Updates - such as commenting on an article, rating a movie, or creating a Fantasy Sports team – can optionally be broadcast to their Twitter stream as Tweets. Eventually, we will extend this capability to developers too – if users of your application currently publish their activities to Yahoo! Updates, they will have the option to also publish these activities into their Twitter stream.

Has our planned Twitter integration piqued your interest? Try your own integration using the new Twitter Tables in YQL, which provide full read/write access to Twitter's APIs using OAuth.

Finally, for more information on the Yahoo/Twitter partnership, visit our corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal.

Yvonne French Product Manager, Yahoo! Social Platforms