Yahoo! Moves To Mimic Facebook

With a dipping revenue graph and dwindling number of advertisers, this move does not come as a big surprise. If successful, Y Connect Could help fill in the financial void while getting much needed traffic to Yahoo's sites.

The Wall Street Journals Amir Efrati said "With Y Connect, users could register with and log into media sites simply by clicking on a Yahoo button. Then, users' activity on the media site can easily be shared with contacts on Yahoo. Content on non-Yahoo sites would be shared via Yahoo Pulse, a hub connected to Yahoo Mail accounts."

Y Connect will attempt to replicate Facebook's marketing tactic of allowing internet advertisers, web developers and third party sites to track the internet activities of users that correlates to their service/product on the web and tailor advertising for these profiles.

The graph below shows why Yahoo! would be so desperate to try something new.

Yahoo! is in a battle with Facebook and Google for share of the display ad market. Both sites recently overtook Yahoo! in the number of minutes people spend on their sites per month.

So far, the only confirmed Y Connect partner is the Huffington Post, which for Yahoo! is great news. The HuffingtonPost.com is one of the biggest sites on the internet, so if its owners are happy with the success, then Yahoo! should find it easy to persuade other publishers in the future.

While there has been no official announcement from Yahoo!, it is expected that Y Connect will be formally announced and launched this fall in the US.

Though the product looks promising one does wonder if 500 million users of Facebook are really interested in trying out something similar from a not so popular service provider. What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts below.