Yahoo is announcing a partnership with Twitter on Wednesday that will bring the services of both companies closer together.
Under the partnership, Yahoo users will be able to read their personal Twitter feeds on several Yahoo sites, including the company’s home page, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Sports. Yahoo users will also be able to directly update their Twitter status from Yahoo and easily share content that they see there with their Twitter followers.
Yahoo will also begin including real-time Twitter content on a variety of its sites. A Yahoo user reading an item about health care legislation on Yahoo News, for instance, may see Twitter updates on the topic on the same page. Yahoo will be able to “curate” those updates — for example, showing only Twitter messages from legislators. As part of that integration, Yahoo will bring more Twitter updates into its search results, as Google and Bing have already done.
“We are letting our users bring what they love about their social networks to Yahoo,” said Cody Simms, senior director of product management at Yahoo.
Mr. Simms said that the integration of Twitter and Yahoo search would begin immediately, while other features of the partnership will be available to users later this year.
Yahoo signed a similar partnership with Facebook in December.
Yahoo executives declined to comment on the finances of the Twitter deal. But Jim Stoneham, vice president for communities at Yahoo, said in December that no money would change hands in Yahoo’s five-year partnership with Facebook.
Yahoo’s strategy to bring Facebook and Twitter into its sites stands in sharp contrast to Google’s approach to social networking. This month Google unveiled Buzz, a new social network that is tightly coupled with Gmail. Its introduction set off angry protests from some users and privacy advocates, prompting Google to apologize and make changes to the service.