14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo is moving forward with its big social web integration plan and has announced Twitter features will be available across many of its online proprieties and tweets will start showing up in search results. This comes after Yahoo also announced a similarly wide-reaching deal with Facebook. Twitter results are already live on Yahoo Search and the rest of the features will be implemented soon.
"We’re partnering with Twitter to integrate their real-time social experience into our global network... Very soon, you will be able to see your Twitter feed on Yahoo! just as easily as you use Yahoo! to consume all of the other great content you love from across the Web," Bryan Lamkin, SVP, Consumer Products Group at Yahoo, wrote.
"Want to see your friends’ latest Twitter posts? Or update your Twitter feed with stories and content from Yahoo!? Or check out trending topics and public updates? You no longer need to stop what you’re doing to see what’s going on with your Twitterverse — you’ll be able to do it all from Yahoo!," he explained.
For now, only the real-time search component is live. Yahoo has had Twitter results for a while now, but they haven't been exactly real-time. Doing a search related to any ongoing or recent event, or any type of query that Yahoo deems Twitter results will be relevant to, will triger the functionality. Searching for something like 'Olympics' will return a number of recent tweets among the regular search results, similar to the way Google handles the same functionality. Real-time Twitter results were also incorporated by Google a couple of months back and Bing also has a Twitter search feature.
For Yahoo, this is just the first step, in the same way that Facebook features will be part of the Yahoo 'experience', users will be able to post their status updates to Twitter, but also redirect any other activity that shows up in Yahoo Updates to their Twitter stream. Yahoo products will also become Twitter clients of sorts enabling users to read their Twitter feeds in places like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and others.