Joining forces is the big new trend in digital media. Recently, Twitter and LinkedIn linked their status updates, and today Yahoo and Facebook have announced that they will allow their users to combine their activity streams.
Currently the Yahoo homepage lets Facebook users check their stream in a preview window without leaving the site. The plan is to establish some real cross-posting.
At some point in the first half of 2010, Yahoo users will be able to see their friends' Facebook activities directly within "Yahoo updates", while activity on Yahoo sites like Flickr may be automatically re-posted to the Facebook news feed.
So far, so good.
More interesting, though, is reading between the lines of this integration.
First, it seems to indicate that Facebook is now more powerful than Yahoo, which once upon a time had its own ambitions for social networking. Remember when Yahoo was buying delicious and flickr back in 2005? Well, these times are over. Now Yahoo has to bow for a little bit of Facebook. As Charles Arthur said, not exactly a position of strength.
Indeed, Facebook answered the question of whether this is a partnership as follows: "Facebook Platform is an open platform, and as such any technology on or off Facebook can integrate with Facebook."
Secondly, there might be a block war coming up. Well, there is a secret block war going on all the time, and as Jack Schofield put it: Facebook wants to be the hub of the social web, and (among many other things) Google wants to be the hub of the social web, the whole web, the deep web, the advertising web, and everything else.
So, Yahoo's lack of power was exposed years ago when Microsoft started trying to take it over, but it probably still wants to be "your dashboard to the web". If it is so, then it is about time that Yahoo looked at integrating Twitter. We are waiting.
What do you think of all of this integration? Do you like cross-posting? Or is it confusing, and it is better to keep the different platforms apart from each other?
