Yahoo Announces New Social and Local IP Communications Experiences

By Raju Shanbhag, TMCnet Contributor

Looking to provide consumers a more personally relevant Web experience, Yahoo unveiled new social and local features.

Yahoo has announced the new Yahoo Messenger Beta, which allows users to play social games from publishers like Zynga, ELEX and OMGPOP, share their status across networks, and view, comment on, and "like" updates from Yahoo Pulse (News - Alert), Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter. Interoperability with Facebook Chat also broadens the group of friends that people can instantly connect.

The company has also launched its Local Offers program with more than a dozen partners to provide a wide selection of local deals, coupons, and other offers, it announced.

“Our job is to connect you with the people, places and things that matter most to you — whether that's making a restaurant reservation, finding a discounted tee time, or playing popular online games with friends," said Blake Irving (News - Alert), executive vice president and chief product officer of Yahoo, in a press release. "We're making Yahoo an even better place for everyone to stay entertained, productive, and informed.”

Yahoo has also announced a new platform which allows them to reach an audience of millions by publishing their creative content on Yahoo. Bringing contributions from more than 400,000 writers, photographers, and videographers to the Internet's largest media destinations, the Yahoo Contributor Network is an evolution of the Associated Content platform.

Yahoo has also announced the first phase of integration with Zynga (News - Alert) which allows the users to launch, play, and share Zynga's popular games like Mafia Wars and FishVille.

Recently, the company made its entrance into the group-buying game. The Internet giant announced earlier this week that it has created a partnership program called "Local Offers," where all the best deal-of-the-day sites are aggregated into one comprehensive repository. The new program, which was announced at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, boasts an impressive lineup of partners, including Goldstar, ScoopSt ValPak, Lifebooker and Groupon.

Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jaclyn Allard

(source: http://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/ip-communications/articles/119767-yahoo-announces-new-social-local-ip-communications-experiences.htm)

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