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.

It was inevitable, and now it’s here, Google has just launched real-time search integrated into search results pages. The new feature updates a real time results module as it discovers new real time results from around the Web — for example, live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and Web pages now stream in on the actual result pages for your query.  Google has signed deals with Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and others that integrates these third party platforms to pull in data in real-time.

By Google taking the plunge and integrating data APIs from third party platforms, it definitely validates the emerging new era of a connected Web of platforms.  A decade ago, the Web was mostly comprised of a presentational layer of static html pages.  Then we saw an explosion of web application development that took these static pages and made them a lot more interactive and dynamic. While these web applications were much more powerful and interoperable, search & discovery has remained relatively unchanged.

Twitter changed things.  Largely a result of its early adopters, Twitter evolved into more of a platform for communication (and development) than an actual web application.  Others have followed suit and we are now at a point that we have these behemoth disparate systems that getting more an more connected to the rest of the Web.

What this means for marketers that you can no longer brush Twitter, Facebook, or other platforms off as fad.  With Google moving full steam ahead integrating these third party systems, you’re SEO and SEM strategies will undoubtedly be affected.  When users search for your keywords, they are going to see real time sentiment in the search results.  This empowers consumers and marketers are going to need to find ways to market to the real-time Web as well as create more intimate relationships with their customers – or suffer the consequences.

What this means for developers is that you need to start thinking about how your technology fits into the rest of the web and how you can leverage all of its disparate platforms. Smart integration of all these systems into unified web applications is going to be occurring over the next few years.  That doesn’t mean setting up a  Twitter account and hiring an intern to send a few tweets out everyday.  It means intelligently developing a strategy to integrate all platforms seamlessly into your own system to leverage the power this new connected Web of platforms.

There’s no denying that Twitter is a great viral marketing channel.  Here’s a tip on how you can leverage your existing digital media marketing efforts such as email newsletters or a facebook fan page to cross promote your Twitter account.  Getting a user to virally promote your product/service  isn’t easy, so making it as effortless as possible is of value.

Twitter allows you to update your status through the query string parameter named “status=”  (the query string is everything after the question mark in a URL).

If you create a link with “http://twitter.com/home?status=enter_text_here” where “enter_text_here” is the status update, it will bring your users to twitter.com and create a tweet.  All they need to do is press their update button.

An example application of this is an email newsletter.  Ask your users for their help.  For example, here’s a link I sent out asking our users to help promote us.

You all have been such a huge part of our success thus far and your feedback has taken our concept product and turned it into something that is both very useful as well as truly innovative.  THANK YOU!

We need your help to continue to spread the word about Frugalytics and here are a few ways you can do that:

1. Do you use Twitter?  Click this link to update your status with “Check out @Frugalytics – Awesome hand picked deals to your twitter feed. Or try http://frugalytics.com on your cell!”

Let me know your thoughts and comments!

Frugalytics now has a deal feed on Twitter of all the hottest deals of the day.  Generally the discounts tend to be in the 40-70% off range and you’ll find everything from kitchen knives to a Samsung Bluetooth Headset (81% off).  If you haven’t heard about Frugalytics yet, it’s a mobile shopping comparison engine that allows you to compare prices anytime, anywhere.