What Yahoo!s Acquisition of BuzzTracker Means

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Yahoo! recently announced that it will purchase BuzzTracker, but didn’t say for how much. This marriage in news aggregation will mean a few things for those of us in the blogosphere who want to stay in the know. The first thing it means is this:

Yahoo! wants to be a competitor. No longer content to rest on its portal laurels, Yahoo! is seriosly trying to make itself relevant to the new millennium. Already the most trafficked website online, the acquisition of BuzzTracker should keep people coming back to Yahoo! – at least for the news.

Secondly, the integration of BuzzTracker into Yahoo!s interface, particularly its personalized features, will mean that users of Yahoo! services will be able to follow all the best news of a particular topic so much more easily. While BuzzTracker has largely been a niche service to the few people who knew about it, it can now become as popular as Yahoo! Games or some of Yahoo!s other services.

Thirdly, Yahoo! Search Marketing ads rolled out onto BuzzTracker’s platform will mean more revenue for Yahoo! That will mean more financial and political clout as well as more money to use to chase Google. Yahoo! may never compete in the realm of search, but with applications like BuzzTracker it can compete in things that matter. Where Google is dominant among SEOs, Yahoo! will likely dominant among social media users (after all, they’ve also inked a deal with Bebo, the UKs very popular version of MySpace).

I’m looking for more great things from Yahoo! in the near future.