Yahoo! Expands Yahoo Buzz

Image via CrunchBase

Yahoo Inc recently added new social features to its Yahoo buzz social news site, currently in beta version. Among the new features are the ability for users to incorporate information from their Yahoo profile onto the site, and an updates section which allows users to find content that their friends have voted for, as well as a comments section.

These updates are part of Yahoo’s Yahoo Open Strategy, which the company first announced in April of this year. The purpose of this strategy, according to Yahoo, Inc, is to allow users to replicate the social experience of social networks like MySpace and Facebook via their Yahoo profiles.

“It is reviewing Yahoo from the inside out, across all of our properties, to fundamentally open up those Web services and provide a consistent development model, a consistent deployment and consumer experience as well, “ Ari Balogh, Yahoo’s chief technology officer, said during a keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco in April.

The Yahoo Buzz expansion updates come less than a week after a proposed advertising deal with Google Inc failed to come to fruition.

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MySpace Announces Launch Of MyAds – Important For You?

   MySpace, Inc has released a beta version of a new do-it-yourself
   advertising platform that allows small businesses and individual
   users to create their own customized banner advertisements,
   specifically targeted at certain types of MySpace users using
   MySpace’s HyperTargeting Technology.

   “MySpace MyAds is a direct marketer’s
   dream—providing entrepreneurs with the most accessible,
   personalized, and targeted advertising toolkit in the
   market,” Jeff Berman, President of Myspace sales and
   marketing said in a recent statement. “We’re giving
   businesses better ROI ASAP and in today’s economy,
   that’s a must-have.”

   Ads are reviewed to ensure that they meet the MySpace terms of
   service, and once they go live, advertisers are only charged
   when users click on the ad, instead of the traditional method of
   charging when an ad is served to a user.

MySpace.com and FaceBook.com – Recent Marketshare Numbers

MySpace.com received 67.54 percent of the market share of U.S. visits in August 2008 among a custom category of 56 of the leading social networking websites according to Hitwise.

Thanks to Manoj Jasra for providing this information.

Mobile Social Networking Poised For Prominence

Mobile social networking services sites, services on the rise.

Its official: social networking sites aren’t just for computers anymore.  Many major companies have made announcements in the past week that they are now or will soon be offering mobile social networking services.

One such company, Visto, unveiled a new service called Visto Mobile 6 which allows you to constantly check popular social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and others from your mobile phone to find out if any of your social networking friends have updated or changed their pages.

AT&T and Verizon have also announced new services. AT&T’s My Communites is a $2.99 per month service and Verizon’s SocialLife for $1.49 are both based on the Intercasting Corp Anthem social networking platform.  Yahoo has also developed a version of its oneConnect service that will allow people to monitor social networks using their Iphone or regular mobile phone.

So what’s next for social networking? If these new apps and services become as popular as most people predict they will, social networking may become the most valuable technology-based business communication method since email.  If so, look for every CEO of every major corporation to have a MySpace in the very near future.