Yahoo! introduces new toy for socially tuned news-holics

An online society of news-hungry voyeurs has worked in favor of many Internet companies providing either one of two services: news feeds or social networking.

A look at Alexa, a web site that computes website traffic, shows that Facebook is the most visited site in Indonesia, followed by a host of search engines and online forums. Taking the tenth spot is detik.com, Indonesia’s first news site.

But when a company like Yahoo! combines both products into one application, namely the Social Bar — known locally as Beranda Sosial — the result is a 200-percent spike in page views to Yahoo’s local news sites.

The Social Bar is Yahoo’s latest product, which the company officially introduced in Indonesia on Wednesday, roughly four months after its US launch.

Alexandre Linares, senior product manager at Yahoo!, explained during a teleconference that the product integrated information from people’s Facebook and Yahoo! accounts.

Once Yahoo! users have opted in for the Social Bar, they can track what their Facebook friends and fellow Social Bar users have been reading on Yahoo! news sites.

This is because information about their friends’ diet of articles will be viewable in designated boxes on the sites themselves and will also be posted on Facebook pages.

“You can immediately see what your friends are reading. Obviously, you can let them see what you are reading, too,” Alexandre said.

He went on to point out that, globally, 20 million Yahoo! users across 85 Yahoo! global sites have opted in for the Social Bar.

Locally, the Social Bar application will work on three of Yahoo Indonesia’s sites that aggregate news: Yahoo! News Indonesia, Yahoo! Indonesia OMG! and Yahoo! Indonesia SHE.

Isaac Souweine, head of product marketing for Mobile, Communications and Communities for Asia Pacific, said that this product was “absolutely perfect for the Indonesian market”.

According to him, Yahoo’s media companies experienced almost 30 percent growth last year and these companies are in the top-three ranking in terms of market presence.

Yahoo’s Internet portal itself sits at sixth place on the Alexa ratings.

“The market is growing fast and we are growing with it,” he said during the teleconference.

He added that there was a very strong presence of Facebook in Indonesia, given that the site has attracted 87 percent of Indonesia’s Internet users, with 92 percent of all Yahoo! media users having Facebook accounts.

“Therefore, this kind of technology is perfectly suited to allow them to share more easily and interact with friends through the content they are already consuming,” he noted.