Yahoo pitches in this week and signals the importance that it gives to social media, with the announcement that it will be integrating with Twitter as well as with Facebook. Effectively, this means that users’ Twitter streams will be accessible from all Yahoo’s products, from its Search page to its acquisitions such as Flickr (seasoned Flickr users will already know that they can tweet or blog their photos right from the Flickr page).
Integration is also set to go further in the near future: comment on an article within the Yahoo sphere, rate something or contribute to Yahoo! Answers – and you’ll have the option to update all your friends via Twitter and Facebook as you do so. Like Google, Yahoo is trying to synthesize your online experiences into one place – and, of course, like Google, they want that place to be their own domain.
As a user, the question is, perhaps, at what point does all this synthesis result in a big fat Too Much Information? But meanwhile, as a small business owner, you need to be sitting up and wondering whether it’s going to benefit you if customer interactions and reviews are appearing in ever more places across the internet – and what you can do to ensure that those messages are positive ones.