two giants of the social networking ...facebook & twitter

It is no longer news - or even worth discussing - why Facebook has more than 400 million users and why 140 - character Twitter updates are the single most important influence today on the media, on the entertainment economy and perhaps even on human knowledge.

What is important to note, however, is that these two giants of the social networking and microblogging world, are becoming more pervasive in the smallest things we do online.

Yahoo, Twitter to boost up social features

San Francisco: Seeking to augment the appeal of its online properties with popular social networking features, Yahoo plans to integrate Twitter into its collection of websites. The partnership will allow web surfers to view the short, 140-character messages created by Twitter users, dubbed Tweets, directly within Yahoo sites as well as to publish their own Twitter messages without leaving Yahoo, reports Alexei Oreskovic from Reuters. 

Yahoo also plans to display a live stream of Tweets within other online properties including its email service and sites devoted to sports, entertainment and finance later this year. The move, which Yahoo announced late on Tuesday, comes a couple of months after Yahoo announced a similar deal with Facebook, the world's No.1 social networking site.

In January, Facebook overtook Yahoo to become the second most visited website in the United States, according to a recent report by web analytics firm Compete. A separate study by comScore showed Yahoo maintaining its No.2 rank with roughly 164 million unique U.S. visitors, while Facebook was the No.4 site with 112 visitors, behind third-ranked Microsoft.

Yahoo said its Internet search engine results will display up-to-the-second Tweets about various topics, matching the so-called "real time search" capabilities that Google and Microsoft announced in their own respective deals with Twitter last year.

Yahoo executives said that the company was looking at ways to make Twitter messages relevant to each property, such as by customizing the selection of messages that appear alongside an article about a particular sporting event, for example. "We believe that the content and context side of things is very unique," Yahoo Vice President of Communities Jim Stoneham told Reuters.

Gmail To Launch Its Own Twitter Like Service

Google is organizing an event to announce a new service today at 10 AM PST. The service / tool will enable users to view status updates and shared links from their friends inside Gmail.

         

The new feature will allow news feed of sorts to the Gmail webmail client which will help users keep up with the activities of their contacts coming from Gmail itself, other Google services, YouTube and Picasa for example, but also third-party services.

The new Google Service will also allow them to post status updates and share content through Gmail. The webmail client already has a limited status update tool of sorts for the integrated chat.

There are also talks of Twitter making their way into Gmail. Google already has an agreement with Twitter and integrates tweets into search. You might soon be able to link Google account to your Twitter one and have your stream pulled and displayed in Gmail.