Another important milestone for Twitter and Yahoo happened last week as Yahoo announced its partnership with social media giant Twitter in a bid to integrate tweets directly into Yahoo’s home page’s news feed both on web and mobile. This was following February’s re-launch of the front page where the redesigned site increased emphasis on personalization and a more modern design.
Yahoo’s Personalization
Yahoo’s mission on personalization is apparently the company’s focus as Yahoo aims to “seamlessly include relevant and personalized tweets alongside stories from Yahoo! and other sources.” Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer calls it #bestoftheweb. It’s apparent that Mayer is campaigning towards Yahoo becoming a more personalized experience. And this partnership with Twitter is just one of the personalization plans in the pipeline.
At the beginning of the year, Mayer, in an interview with Bloomberg, talked about developing powerful and strong personalization technologies through the “interest graph”. Referring to dominating organizations such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, Mayer says, there is always an opportunity for distraction. This partnership with Twitter may just be the one.
One can easily draw conclusions as to the direction of Yahoo towards the personalization paradigm based on its recent deals and announcements, the latest of which is the homepage revamp back in February.
Other indications of gearing up to reinventing itself under Mayer’s leadership include launching well-received apps like a revamped Flickr and its new Weather app for iOS which may be one of the highest rated iPhone applications, gobbling up startups and paring down its scattered lineup.
How It Works
Yahoo news feed offers an endless scrollable stream of content and tweets will now appear directly on these feeds. Yahoo divides its news feed into sections like “News”, All Stories”, “Local”, “Entertainment”, “Sports” and more. Headlines coming from Twitter accounts will be indicated by referencing the source by its Twitter handle, e.g., @ABCWorldNews instead of ABC News. Expectedly, there will be “follow” buttons to the right of the stories which will allow users to click to add the news organization to their Twitter feeds.
Politicians, media outlets, celebrities and other publishers can release their updates and they will become an important source of real-time news and information. With Twitter’s 140-character limit, athletes can connect with their fans, inspire global debate and capture live chatter from the red carpet.
Twitter Update is Part of the Plan
Mayer had indicated her plans for the company as executed in a series of sprints that focus on different areas of importance. This was evident during Yahoo’s 2013 Q1 quarterly earnings call in April.
The first completed sprint was about building the culture and talent at Yahoo. This will be followed by the next sprint which is about delighting users of Yahoo with new features “making continuous improvements and adjustments over time.” Mayer also indicated plans on Yahoo’s products which will be released with small changes much more frequently. And signs are showing up that Yahoo’s Q1 financials to be going up since Mayer assumed her post as CEO in summer of 2012.
The integration of Yahoo and Twitter is currently rolling out all over the United States for mobile and desktop users. Anytime soon, you will see tweets in Yahoo’s news feeds which could only mean that the rollout is done and successfully working in your area.
