Yahoo!: Now Even More Social

Yahoo! continues to integrate different forms of social media. This time the venue for the integration is Yahoo! Maps. Om Malik’s blog reports that Yahoo! Local today will bring in the Flickr photo-sharing service and Upcoming, a social online calendar service it bought last year. Users of Yahoo! Maps will be able to search for images and events that are uploaded by other users and tagged so that they appear in geographically relevant ways in Yahoo! Maps.

This has many implications for businesses to supply more rich information about themselves, although it’s unclear how or if this will be initially integrated with other small-business advertising products within Yahoo! Local, such as its featured listings. It is clear, however, that this will bring more functionality to Yahoo! Local, as it is built on Yahoo! Maps (the two, like Google’s mapping and Local products, are converging in many ways).

This also brings Yahoo! one step further down the social media path. The integration of photos and events, for example, is an intuitive one. GigaOm writer Liz Gannes also adeptly points out that the next step in socializing these offerings for Yahoo! could be presence integration via Yahoo! Messenger.

Elsewhere in social media, The San Francisco Chronicle profiles a number of unsung "Web 2.0" companies that we could hear more from if the social media space holds its current course.