Earlier this evening Yahoo announced that it had deepened its relationship with Twitter and would be integrating Twitter’s feeds and content across its network:

The partnership integrates Twitter’s real-time social experiences with Yahoo!’s global network of nearly 600M people. Together with the recently announced Facebook integration, this relationship is a key part of advancing Yahoo!’s social strategy, transforming it into a highly customizable social experience that lets people unify their activity from their many social experiences across the Web.

The integration also provides Yahoo! with full access to the complete Twitter public data stream, which Yahoo! will use to improve the relevance and freshness of content across Yahoo! properties. This will drive deeper user engagement, and create new and compelling opportunities for developers, advertisers, and publishers.

Mechanically here’s how it will work according to Yahoo:

• People will be able to access their personal Twitter feeds across Yahoo!’s many products and properties, including the homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and others, letting them check in more easily on what’s happening with the people and things they care about while on Yahoo!.
• People will be able to update their Twitter status and share content from Yahoo! in their Twitter stream, so they can easily share their Yahoo! experiences with their friends and followers on Twitter.
• Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! media properties like News, Finance, Entertainment, and Sports will include real-time public Twitter updates across a variety of topics. Yahoo! Search users will immediately see real-time Twitter results today; go to Yahoo! and try it out.

Yahoo is also implementing Facebook Connect and, according to AllThingsD, will also be doing a version of these integrations with LinkedIn and MySpace as part of a so-called “project Rushmore.”

I have two quick and opposing thoughts:

• The  integration of real-time search data by the major engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) basically “co-opts” the movement and will likely marginalize the group of real-time engines that emerged to fill the void before Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were doing it.
• Will this particular Twitter-Yahoo integration benefit Yahoo in any way? Beyond search itself, we haven’t seen how it will play out across the Yahoo properties. One could imagine novel and useful implementations in news, finance, mobile and local. However that remains to be seen.

Related Topics: Yahoo: Maps & Local | Yahoo: Mobile & Go | Yahoo: Partnerships

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

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