Two months ago, Yahoo! acquired Associated Content for an estimated $90-100M. Over the past few years, Associated Content has become one of the most prolific content farms (companies that churn out hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content every day). It produces 10,000 new pieces of content per week, which averages out to about 1,500 per day. This isn't as big an output as Demand Media, which at last estimate is doing 7,000 pieces of content per day. But it's three times as large as Suite101, which we profiled yesterday.
The acquisition increased the number of pages Yahoo! has on the Web by over 10% and brought Yahoo! back into the original content game, albeit in a largely unbranded way at this point. Let's look at how Yahoo! has been using its new farm...
Last month, social photo-sharing site Flickr finally added some long-awaited Facebook integration to its service, allowing users to simultaneously post photos on both Flickr and Facebook with one upload. But there was a small problem with the way that the new feature was set up: it basically spammed your Facebook Wall with post after post about your new photos.
Today, that problem has been fixed, reports Flickr.
According to the Yahoo help site, Yahoo Personals will close permanently on July 21. Users may either quit the pay-to-date service or transfer their profiles to Match.com.
Dating services have been online for quite a while - the debate over their efficacy beginning about eight seconds after the first personal appeared - and have grown in popularity since. But the shuttering of Yahoo Personals may owe as much to a change in revenue models as anything else.
Much like Google's Suggest feature, Yahoo offers suggestions, as you type, for popular search queries with a feature called "Search Assist". Today, Yahoo announced that it is trying to make its own feature that much more useful by offering near real-time suggestions when you enter a phrase into the search box.
Unlike Google, however, it looks like Yahoo gives time relevance a higher priority in its suggestion algorithm, separating the two suggestion services.
The Exceptional Performance crew at Yahoo has launched Boomerang.
"Boomerang is a piece of Javascript that you add to your web pages, where it measures the performance of your website from your end user's point of view. It has the ability to send this data back to your server for further analysis. With Boomerang, you find out exactly how fast your users think your site is."
Maybe now we can see why Yahoo wanted to buy location-based check-in service Foursquare last April - it's sinking its teeth deeper into the geolocation arena. The search engine and content aggregator announced this morning the release of Yahoo PlaceFinder, an expansion of their mapping and location capabilities that take aim in the direction of check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla and other location features like Twitter Places.
While Yahoo may have been a little late to the social game, it seems determined to not fall behind in the next big thing - mobile social.
A few weeks ago we told you about a Pew study that found 71% of young adults aged 18 to 29 had changed their online privacy settings to limit which information they share with others. But what about Internet users at a younger age? It's hard to estimate how many tweens and teens worry about their privacy online, but a recent survey of 2,000 internet users by Yahoo found that parents are playing a strong role in helping their children understand these issues.
Social photo-sharing site Flickr has, at long last, added some much-need social networking integration to its online service. You can now simultaneously post your photos to Flickr and Facebook. Only photos you set as "public" will appear on your Facebook Wall, however, as the new sharing options respect your photos' privacy settings.
But don't be confused if you start seeing double-posts of Flickr photos once you enable this new feature: this supplements, but does not replace the native Flickr sharing you may have configured earlier via Facebook settings.
Yahoo has announced a series of changes set to roll out this week that integrate Facebook's social networking service into various Yahoo properties, including Yahoo Mail and its homepage. Also included in the announcement is news of a refresh for Yahoo Profiles. Originally launched in 2008, the new profiles will be accessible at pulse.yahoo.com (whenever Yahoo gets around to making that URL live, that is.)
With all these changes, we wonder: Did Yahoo finally pick a new direction? And is it "social network aggregation?"
Yahoo announced last night it has acquired Koprol, an Indonesian mobile location-based service. With Koprol, which launched last year, users are able to see where their friends are and what they're doing in real-time. Like Foursquare here in the U.S., Koprol lets people check in when they arrive at a particular location and then share tips, reviews, photos or other messages with nearby users.
