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Yahoo Moving in on Twitter

Written on December 10, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Yahoo (moves toward the little blue bird, the center of attention at the party): Well, hello there, baby. You sure are popular here.

Twitter (BIG SMILE): Yep! And I have #friends @overthere and @overthere and—

Yahoo (slips an arm around the bird): How would you like to come back to my place for a little . . . integration?

Twitter: Whoa, buddy—this is why I carry an API at all times!

Back in July, Twitter was popping up everywhere: first a deal with Bing, then a deal with Google. Not to be left out, Yahoo made a real-time foray with OneRiot, but apparently they still had their eyes on the life of the party: Twitter.

Last month, Yahoo News integrated Twitter into its results for breaking news via a tabbed shortcut:

Apparently this went well, because now more of these Tweet results will be directly integrated into the SERPs—and they just might be doing this right:

However, Yahoo won’t be adding Twitter to all its results. According to the Yahoo Search blog,

So how does this work? We continuously keep track of queries searched on Yahoo!, and when there is a spike in interest in a topic, our search algorithm selects relevant tweets to show on the search results page, either as a part of the Yahoo! News shortcut or in a Twitter section, like in the examples above. The age of the tweets will vary – some will be a minute old, while others may be hours old. Our goal is to feature interesting Twitter content that is relevant to your query and complements the other results you find on the search page.

And if they do that, that might be just the way to integrate Twitter into SERPs: filtered for relevance, used only for topics generating a lot of discussion, and sequestered in a section of the SERP.

What do you think? Is this too little, too late for Yahoo? Or is this more than you want to see of Twitter in your SERPs?

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Yahoo Moving in on Twitter

AOL vs Yahoo–Again

Written on December 10, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, marketing

It’s been a long time doming, but now it’s officially, truly, official: AOL is part of Time Warner no more. (Technically, actually, AOL bought Time Warner—isn’t that weird?—and now they’re the ones being spun off.) And with its newly-single status, AOL is eyeing every woman in the room—especially old flame Yahoo.

They were flirting (or at least rumors have been flying) heavily last year, with reports resurfacing periodically. But now the love has turned to rivalry, with AOL and Yahoo both focusing on their Internet display advertising businesses.

AOL is also looking to take on other Internet behemoths like Citysearch, Yelp and Google in a local effort:

The initiative — which he characterized as “digitizing towns” — will grow to 100 municipalities in 2010, [AOL CEO and ex-Googler Tim] Armstrong said. Providing a turn-key platform where schools, government departments, local businesses, and classified listings firms can create or update Web sites will be at the heart of the effort.

AOL is also focusing on an API-intensive ad platform to allow users to interface directly with their data. That’s cool.

But the heart of their plan is their content. AOL will be heavily focusing its advertising sales upon its own properties, where 80% of the content is original. Yahoo, by contrast, has about 20% original content.

What do you think? Can AOL be turned around, or is it too late?

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AOL vs Yahoo–Again