14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo has just announced another big step in its strategy to add social elements to its properties. While the site has been integrating Facebook and more recently Twitter into its products, it is now introducing a number of social games to Yahoo Messenger, its games portal and several other products.
Games from Zynga, OMGPOP and ELEX are now available from Yahoo. The web giant will be integrating the social games with Yahoo Games, an obvious choice, on the My Yahoo personalized homepage, in Yahoo Messenger 11 which saw its first beta release earlier, as well as in its browser toolbar and Yahoo Pulse.
For now, only a couple of games are available from each publisher. Zynga will be bringing FishVille and Mafia Wars, but not its most popular creations like FarmVille and FrontierVille.
This is just a first step, a trial run, so the choice of games makes sense. You can expect the hotter properties to hit Yahoo once things settle down. Considering that Yahoo has been working on this and has announced that social games will be available quite some time ago, it may be a while before you can get to play all your favorite games.
The deal makes a lot of sense for both companies. Yahoo has been looking to revitalize its online properties and social games seem like a surefire way of getting people to spend more time on Yahoo.
Yahoo is also working on integrating more social features, again, in the hope that people will spend more time on its sites and with its apps. Yahoo has just announced that the Twitter integration is now underway. Facebook is accessible from a number of Yahoo services already.
For Zynga, the draw is getting its games in front of a wider audience and be less dependent on Facebook. While the two companies have worked out their differences with a long-term agreement earlier this year, Zynga wants to expand as far from Facebook as possible to ensure that it can stand on its own.