Yahoo announced a relaunch of Yahoo Profiles and their “all in” integration with Facebook Connect, including on the Yahoo home page. According to Yahoo:
Yahoo! has reached an important milestone in its partnership with Facebook. Starting globally today, people who use both Yahoo! and Facebook can link their accounts and view and share updates with friends across both networks. People who connect their accounts can consume their Facebook newsfeed on the Yahoo! homepage and in Yahoo! Mail and other Yahoo! sites and services. Additionally, people who create and share content on Yahoo! sites – including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Flickr, and many Yahoo! entertainment sites, such as omg!, Yahoo! TV, and Yahoo! Movies – can easily share their contributions across Facebook. Additional integrations will be ongoing.
I first wrote about the changing Web of Third Party Platform Integration back in late 2009. This new move by Yahoo! is further evidence of the Web’s ongoing evolution towards cloud-based mashups of platforms that communicate with each other. This is an obvious win for Facebook as it solidifies their place as THE ‘real world’ social communications medium or hub of the web. But this is also a major win for Yahoo! in that Yahoo! controls a massive content network that will gain visibility through social media integration.
Many would argue that this obvious short term win would be a risky long term strategy but I believe there is an underlying plan at play here. While Yahoo! does have a large amount of registered users across many web properties they do not have the amazingly rich social graph that Facebook has created, nor can they easily replicate it. By providing a strong bilateral integration into Facebook they have the opportunity to mine a great deal of socail related data across many web properties in order to apply the fundamentals of data science.
The future belongs to the companies who figure out how to collect and use data successfully. Both parties have a massive opportunity to gain access to large amounts of valuable data.