Yahoo! to link Facebook, Gmail on its homepage

MANILA, Philippines - Internet search engine Yahoo! will soon integrate rival but popular Web destinations - such as Gmail and Facebook links - in its homepage, a move that will lure more consumers, advertisers, and developers.
By late 2009 or early 2010, a different Yahoo! homepage will be launched, Ken Mandel, the company's Southeast Asian vice-president and managing director, announced during a recent visit.
"This is a part of our strategy to make Yahoo an open portal that will connect all these websites together in order for our advertisers to monetize their ads," said Mandel, a former CEO of a digital media network.
Earlier, US-based Yahoo! announced that it is embracing an "open and social" platform as a way to lure consumers, advertisers, and developers.
The company has introduced the Yahoo Developer Network (YDN) which provides developers access to libraries, language centers, and application programming interfaces (APIs), which help programmers build software applications.
Already, Southeast Asia is the fourth most active YDN, with the US topping the list, followed by Britain and India. The shift in Asia will start once the Internet becomes more accessible to developers, Mandel said.
Social networking sites could also be an important advertising source of revenue since millions of people logging in to networking sites everyday, he added.
"It connects us from people we care about," he said, noting that Asia is growing much faster than the rest of the world, not just in social networking, but everything online.
Mandel also dismissed the need to introduce another social networking site since there are a number of these already. What Yahoo intends to do is to turn itself into a starting point for consumers, he said.
Mandel's Manila visit coincided with the release of an online study jointly undertaken by Yahoo and research firm Nielsen which provided information regarding the habits of urban Filipino Internet users
Some of the research's key findings indicate that
Twenty-eighter percent of Filipinos in Philippine urban areas have accessed the Internet in the past month while five percent access the Internet everyday
Internet use is not restricted to Metro Manila but other cities such as Cagayan de Oro. Thirty-five percent of CDO residents have gone online for the past month.
Filipino Internet users are more likely to be opinion leaders and early adopters compared to traditional media consumers. They are likely to be individualistic, trend conscious, willing to pay for quality products, and are tech-enthusiasts.
Internet cafes are an important Internet access point since 71 percent have gone online through net cafes in the past three months. Forty-seven percent of all Internet time are spent in Internet cafes.
Social networking is a key online activity. More than half - at 51 percent - claimed to have visited a social networking site in the past month. One in three Filipino Internet users have a blog.
- GMANews.TV