Yahoo News is seeing huge returns from Facebook's Open Graph, is this the future of Flickr?
Here Mike Kerns, who runs social and personalization at +Yahoo! News talks to me about the effects Yahoo has seen thanks to the inclusion of Open Graph technology from Facebook (AKA “frictionless sharing").
Context & Ripple Effects
Yahoo had already been working on social features through its effort to raise users’ “social IQ”, while Flickr had long served as a model for making Yahoo’s products more participatory in the “Flickrization” of Yahoo.
Yahoo News’ reported returns give Facebook’s Open Graph a concrete publisher use case beyond the framework described in the 2010 Open Graph guide: sharing data can feed both distribution and personalization.
First-order effects
- Yahoo News has evidence to keep integrating Facebook’s Open Graph, tying more of its social and personalization work to Facebook’s sharing layer.
- Facebook gains a prominent publisher validation for frictionless sharing, strengthening its case to other media partners.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo’s other consumer properties, including Flickr, face pressure to show whether Facebook-linked sharing can deliver comparable engagement without displacing Yahoo’s own social identity.
- Publishers evaluating social distribution gain a stronger incentive to measure Facebook-driven referrals and personalization against traffic they control directly.
Third-order effects
- If publisher integrations keep producing measurable returns, social graphs become infrastructure for news discovery rather than a separate destination, concentrating leverage with the platforms that hold identity and sharing data.
The trend: News publishers are moving from adding social buttons to embedding social-graph data in distribution and personalization systems.