The Yahoo-Facebook, Google-Twitter, OpenID Competition

Shevonne authors at ChicWriter.com and wrote this article on behalf of TopHost.Gr, a Greek web host that offers shared hosting.

Yahoo announced that it has signed a five-year agreement with Facebook to allow its users to share content on its site using their Facebook account.

Yahoo users will start seeing the Facebook integration in early 2010. According to the agreement, users will be able to use their Facebook login information to send any comments they leave on Yahoo sites. Being that Flickr is one of Yahoo’s site, users will also be able to share Flickr images with their Facebook friends.

Yahoo-Facebook

There is no money that was exchanged between the two companies, but it doesn’t mean that they aren’t both achieving something from this partnership. According to comScore, 52% of Yahoo users are also on Facebook. Yahoo Senior Director of product management Cody Simms says, “Making Yahoo stickier and helping syndicate content.”

Yahoo has great sites that many people don’t know they have because their comment system and sharing options are not up to par with other sites. With Facebook behind it, Yahoo can finally get these up to par quickly, and be able to appeal to its users and potential future users.

Google-Twitter

Now, Google has announced that it will be integrating its Friend Connect with Twitter. This will allow users to login using their Twitter identity, and be able to share content from the sites you join using Google Friend Connect. Users of both service will start seeing the Twitter integration. This will help Google to get more involved with social networking and real-time streaming, which is an area that they have been behind on.

Open-ID

This puts Google/Twitter and Yahoo/Facebook in direct competition with OpenID, the popular single-sign on service. OpenID is being widely used, but there really isn’t much use for it, other than not having to remember different user ID/password combinations. We’ll see how these partnerships affect OpenID In 2010.