In the latest in an ongoing series of moves to shake things up, Yahoo announced a new partnership with Twitter Thursday that will see select Tweets being folded into the Yahoo newsfeed.
“Updates direct from politicians, celebrities, media outlets, and other publishers have become an important source of real-time news and information,” explained Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer in a company blog post. “Tweets have become an important information source for many of our users, so we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Twitter to bring Tweets directly into the Yahoo! newsfeed.”
In its current form, the Yahoo newsfeed aggregates news content from across the web. News stories are funneled into different categories such as ‘news,’ ‘entertainment,’ ‘sports,’ or ‘local.’
The plan to integrate Twitter assumedly involves introducing relevant Tweets into the appropriate news stream category. It’s not yet clear what sort of criteria will be used in determining which tweets make it into the newsfeed. However since many users these days turn to Twitter for the most up-to-the-minute updates, Yahoo’s integration with Twitter seems to make pretty good sense.
Recent events such as the Boston Marathon bombing/manhunt and the Cleveland kidnapping case have bolstered Twitter’s status as the place to go for the most recent updates on breaking news stories.
It’s also not yet known whether Tweets appearing in the newsfeed will be curated by editors or selected by an algorithm. Mayer, for her part, revealed few specifics in her blog post; simply stating that, “As users explore our nearly endless stream of content, we will seamlessly include relevant and personalized Tweets alongside stories from Yahoo! and our other sources.”
However it ends up playing out, it looks like a potential big win for both parties. Yahoo will potentially become more interactive while also benefiting from being more closely aligned with Twitter, a platform that embodies the new social media focused web just as Yahoo once epitomized the essence of the 'old' web. Twitter meanwhile, will get its content before the eyes of Yahoo users who may not yet be using the micro-blogging site.
It’s also unknown what sort of avenues will be opened, if any, for sponsored Tweets to make their way into the Yahoo newsfeed.
The integration is set to be rolled out over the next couple days to desktop and mobile devices.
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