Yahoo is betting the farm on Facebook with the launch of a completely new and social way to consume news.
The new Yahoo News feature, whose release coincides with the launch of the new Facebook Open Graph, is an attempt to infuse social into the news curation and discovery process.
“Yahoo has always had amazing content and amazing editorial ability,” Yahoo Director of Product Management Jonathan Katzman says. “Now users can discover the content through their friends.”
Once a user opts into the service (via the new Facebook permissions screen), she will be able to see what news stories her friends have read on both Facebook and Yahoo News. This simple two-way stream of information makes it possible to discover news content through your friends.
The crux of the Yahoo News-Facebook integration is the “facebar,” a row of your friends’ faces that appear above any article you read. Clicking on any of these faces will bring up their recent activity. There is also now a “You on Yahoo News” widget that sits to the right of the content. This widget lets you see a history of what you’ve read and gives you options for removing different stories from your Yahoo News feed and turning the social features off altogether.
This is only the beginning for Yahoo, though. The digital media company is also integrating Facebook withIntoNow, a mobile app that “listens to” and tags TV shows (the company acquired IntoNow earlier this year). “What we’re trying to have happen, and Facebook is trying to do as well, is to be the river of information flowing around your activity,” Katzman says.
Other Yahoo products will roll out with Facebook integration in the next few months, thanks to the additions the social network has made to the Open Graph. Yahoo believes that Facebook integration is good for business as well — it will lead to higher engagement, the struggling Internet giant argues.
The new Facebook integration in Yahoo News is simple, but it’s just the beginning for what the the company has planned. Facebook is about to become a whole lot more prominent on Yahoo.
