Yahoo announced late Tuesday that it is expanding its Facebook social sharing feature to 26 other Yahoo sites around the world, allowing Facebook users to share more of their activities on Yahoo’s websites, including stories they are reading.
Yahoo introduced the Facebook-sharing option in its main new section three months ago. This feature will now be available in 26 other parts of Yahoo’s site, including Yahoo TV, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo Games, and omg!.
The company has seen a 300% traffic boost from Facebook to Yahoo News since the feature was implemented about two months ago, wrote Mike Kerns, the vice president of social and personalization for Yahoo, in a blog post.
Yahoo will add a Notifications button across Yahoo in the U.S., to alert users when they receive feedback on a review, response to comments, stock alerts, and more. Also, to two popular sections of Yahoo, finance and sports, where Facebook sharing is still not available, are expected to be linked early next year.
Yahoo in Partnership with Facebook is all set to test the hypothesis of “six degree of seperation”, an iconic social experiment of Stanley Milgram in 1960s that people are connected around the world in an approximate just six steps away.”Small World Experiment” was launch this week to prove or disprove the theory in a proper scientific test on a grand scale (Facebook platform).
Researchers had taken several experiment in the past but were considered to have potential flaws in their attempts since their experiments were based on relatively small research samples.
Drawing on Facebook with its 750 million users, each having an average of 130 friends the “Small World Experiment” is expected to determine the social path length between two strangers.
Facebook users can participate by going to http://smallworld.sanbox.yahoo.com and will be given the name of a target and asked to pick one of their Facebook friends to forward the message and then pass the message from friend to friend so that it reaches the ‘target person’ in as few steps as possible. The more users participate the more better it will give insight to the experiment.
According to Duncan Watts, Yahoo’ s principal research scientist who is leading the experiment said, “the study is intended as academic social research and will be published in peer-reviews scientific journal”. But the result could have application to social media marketing, whereby advertisement is an important part of Facebook’s commercial.
Flickr introduced the option to create new account on Flickr using a Google ID, and eliminating the need to have or create a Yahoo ID to use the service.
Today, Flicker announced that they have extended the feature to allow new and existing users to sign in to the service with Facebook IDs too.
Moreover, members who use Facebook or Google IDs to log into Flickr can also share their public photo automatically on Facebook when they upload them to Flickr, once they configure the connection with Facebook in their Flickr account settings Page.
Facebook Overtook Yahoo to become the second biggest video viewing site in the United States.
The figures for August 2010 online video viewing provided by ComScore suggests Google Sites tops the list, driven by its video sharing website YouTube, with 146.3 million unique viewers. Facebook with 58.6 million Unique viewers, for a total of 243 million viewing sessions came second. Yahoo! Sites ranked third with 53.9 million, followed by VEVO with 45.4 million.
Facebook still lost out to Yahoo! in terms of how long people spent watching video with an average of 20.5 minutes per viewer compared to the 31.6 minutes per view for Yahoo!
It was a different story when it came to video ads. Hulu, which did not figured in the top 10 list of unique viewers was number one for Video advertising. The site served 789,859 ads with a frequency of 30.2 per viewer, and reaching out to 8.8% of the total population. Google Sites came fifth, while Facebook and Yahoo! did not even figured in the list.
Facebook is fast gaining ground as one of the top video referral site, but it will be difficult for it to monitize the videos. Most of the contents shared/viewed on Facebook are hosted on third-party site like YouTube.
Other notable findings of the comScore Video Metrix includes:
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- The top video ad networks in terms of their potential reach of the total U.S. population were: Break Media at 46.4 percent, BrightRoll Video Network at 45.0 percent, and ScanScout Network at 44.5 percent.
- 85.1 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
- The duration of the average online content video was 4.8 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.
- Video ads accounted for 10.7 percent of all videos viewed and 1.0 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.
According to a new study, Facebook is receiving more time from American web surfers than Google Inc or Yahoo Inc.
ComScore revealed Thursday that in August 2010, U.S. web surfers spend a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, or about 9.9 percent of the total web-surfing time in the month of August. Google managed to get around 39.8 million minutes of the web surfers’ time from all its services including YouTube, Gmail, Google news and other content sites.
Yahoo Inc came third with users spending around 37.7 million minutes of their time on its services.
Just a year back, Facebook managed to get the attention of only 5 percent of the people web surfing time, while Yahoo Inc enjoyed almost 12 percent of the total time spend by the U.S. web surfers.
In July 2010, Facebook overtook Yahoo for the first time as well as announced crossing the ’500 million users’ mark. The latest report just confirm the inevietable truth – Facebook is the new king of the Web.
Google is the only website that stands in the way of Facebook in becoming the most popular site in the United States. Web analytics firm Compete reports that Facebook surpassed Yahoo to become the second most-visited website in the country.
In January, Facebook attracted nearly 134 million unique visitors in while Yahoo’s traffic declined to 132 million unique visitors. Google leads the pack with 147 million unique visitors.
Figures grabs the eyeballs, but for some time. On the attention front, Facebook is second to none. The site found that Facebook user spent 11.6% of all their internet time on Facebook as compared to 4.25% and 4.1% of their time on Yahoo and Google respectively.
Just a year back, Facebook had a little less than 70 million unique visitors. Facebook has enjoyed explosive growth over the last year with its user base touching 400 million mark world wide. Almost 50% of these users logs on to the site each day.
Questions like will Facebook be able to catch Google or how long will it take to go past Google remains to be seen. But, with the recent launch of Google Buzz, the number 1 spot might be a hard chase.
The staggering usage growth of Facebook continues unabated as the company achieves yet another milestone – 100 million U.S. unique visitor in November. Accoridng to comScore, this is the first time the social networking site has exceeded that monthly mark.
Just recently, Aol celebrated its re-emergence as an independently-traded company. It was the fourth largest Website in the U.S. until last month. Comscore data for November, 2009 shows that Facebook went past Aol with 102.9 million unique visitors in the U.S., against Aol’s 99.7 million. The other leaders are Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google with 130, 160 and 168 million U.S. visitors respectively.
On a global basis, Facebook already passed Aol back in Febuary 2009 to become the fouth largest site worldwide. With the current pace of Facebook, it might not take long to catch up Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google.
How long do you guys think Facebook will take to become the largest Website in U.S.?
[Source: Washington Post]
Yahoo Inc. is getting friendlier with Facebook if the news are to go by.
The two companies are in an expanded partnership announced Wednesday, which will enable Yahoo users with Facebook accounts to blend material from the two web sites without having to leave one site for the other.
This move will deepen the bond established when Yahoo home pages began presenting a glimpse of Facebook updates.
The current deal will intergrate the Facebook Connect service across yahoo, which will allow users to see their Facebook streams on yahoo’s email, Flickr, news, sports and finance sites. On the flip side, personal meterial from Yahoo such as e-mail, movie reviews, and photos can be more easily share on Facebook. Users will also be able to view and update status messages from Yahoo.
These tools are scheduled to be activated somewhere in the first half of 2010.
“As the place where over 500 million people visit every month, Yahoo!’s goal is to bring together social experiences from across the web, and provide one place for people to access information and stay in touch with the people they care about most,” Jim Stoneham, vice president of Communitites for Yahoo! wrote in a blog.
[Source: Associate Press , Yodel Anecdotel blog ]
The race to the top and and the final list of most searched terms of 2009 didn’t came as a shock, but was more of a thriller. Michael Jackson’s untimely death in June has topped year-end search lists from both Google and Yahoo.
The search companies released their annual lists on Tuesday as an effort to provide a cultural snapshot of what held the public’s interest over the past year. Jackson topped both Google’s fastest-rising and Yahoo’s overall searches.
“As millions of fans said goodbye to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson led the list of our top 10 fastest rising queries across the globe. And a new star was born, too – quirky pop singer Lady Gaga became a search sensation the world over,” wrote Google in their December 1, Zeitgeist blog post.
Michael Jackson tops Google’s list of fastest rising global searches in 2009. The pop star is followed by social networking site, Facebook and its invite-only Spanish social networking rival, Tuenti. This top 10 list includes:
1) Michael Jackson
2) Facebook
3) Tuenti
4) Twitter
5) Sanalika
6) New Moon
7) Lady Gaga 
Windows 7
9) Dantri.com.vn
10) Torpedo Gratis
While Facebook and Twitter well known social-networking sites, two more social-networking sites managed to get themselves in the list; Spain’s Tuenti and Turkey’s Sanalika. The two other websites that made to the list are the Vietnamese portal dantri.com.vn and Portuguese SMS website Torpedo Gratis.
Yahoo’s list was also headed by Michael Jackson in the top place with the list as follows:
1) Michael Jackson
2) Twilight
3) WWE
4) Megan Fox
5) Britney Spears
6) Japanese anime character Naruto
7) American Idol
8)Kim Kardashian
9)NASCAR
10) and online role-playing game Runescape.
Yahoo said the dominance of pop culture in the searches shows that the internet is being used largely for entertainment purposes.
Many people login to facebook with the help of search engines, primarily Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and AOL. Search engines help us find answers to information, but they can also help us get to websites without typing URLs. For example, type in “facebook login“ into Google and you can find FacebookLogin.net on the front page as the third result. Users all around the world can type in “facebook login“ into Google and then click on the link for FacebookLogin.net instead of having to type in double-u double-u double-u dot facebook login dot net.
