Marissa Mayer-led Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has partnered with Twitter Inc. to display tweets alongside other items on its home page news feeds. Mayer knows well that when there is breaking news like celebrity deaths, election results, terrorist attacks, or earthquakes, people turn to the microblogging site to get the latest updates. Marissa Mayer said on Yahoo! Inc.’s official blog that Tweets have become an important source of information for a large number of users.
American users will see tweets on their mobile and desktop versions of Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO)’s news service within a few days. Mayer didn’t disclose which news agencies or publications’ tweets will appear in its news feeds. Along with news, entertainment and sports tweets will also be included.
The headlines in Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) news feeds that come from Twitter will appear with a Twitter handle of the source, for example, @ABCWorldNews. Users will also see a “Follow” button to the right of such headlines, providing users an option to add the news publication to their feeds.
Personalization
The partnership with Twitter Inc. reiterates Marissa Mayer’s mission to improve personalization. Earlier this year, Yahoo! Inc. revamped its Homepage to offer personalized services to users. The home page news feeds are generic when a user logs onto a page for the first time. But as they click on the content of their interest, it learns about the users’ preferences and starts offering personalized feeds. The more Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) learns about users’ preferences, the more personalized the stories become. The same personalization technology will also apply to tweets.
Yahoo Betting Big On Mobile
Since being appointed as the CEO of Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) in July last year, Mayer has made mobile a major part of her restructuring plans. She has closed many not-so-popular services such as local events calendar and a coupon site to focus its resources on mobile applications. The company has been adding services for mobile users. Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has also acquired several mobile app startups such as Alike and Summly. After acquiring Summly for $30 million in March, the company updated its iPhone app that has built-in Summly summaries.
Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) shares were down 2.30 percent to $26.71 at 3:30 PM EDT.
