Yahoo! Brings 'Frictionless Sharing' to 26 More Sites

Yahoo! announced an extension to the Facebook integration it introduced in September to 26 additional sites worldwide, including Yahoo TV, Yahoo Movies and Yahoo Games. Yahoo News has taken advantage of Facebook’s new “frictionless sharing” method that allows apps to automatically publish stories about a user’s activity to the home page Ticker and Timeline. Yahoo claims referrals from Facebook to Yahoo News have increased by 300% in three months and that the site is seeing more traffic from the 18-34 audience as a result. Adding social reading features to the company’s other online properties is likely to continue to increase traffic, but Yahoo, like others integrating Facebook Open Graph, will need to continue to make it clear to users how their activity is being shared and how they can hide certain actions. Since launching the Yahoo News friends' activity feature, Yahoo says more than 12 million people have opted in for the service. When users connect their Facebook accounts with the Yahoo app, any stories people read on Yahoo News will be shared with friends via the Ticker, aggregate News Feed stories and in a box on users’ Timelines. Some users are hesitant to have everything they read displayed to their friends. It can be frustrating then to click on a Yahoo News link that brings up a permissions dialog rather than the story. There does not seem to be a way to opt out of connecting with the app and still go on to read the article. However, once users add the app, Yahoo does a nice job of informing people how their activity is being shared and giving them an easy way to browse privately. We have previously compared how privacy and frictionless sharing is handled by social reader apps from The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily and The Independent. Yahoo, however, is the most popular with 20 million monthly active users, according to AppData, our data tracking service covering growth for apps on Facebook. The Washington Post Social Reader is the next most used with 4.7 million MAU.

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Yahoo! Brings 'Frictionless Sharing' to 26 More Sites

Brittany Darwell

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Brittany Darwell