Friendster, Yahoo ink cross-promotion deal

Friendster and Yahoo Southeast Asia have struck a cross-promotion deal offering a customized app to users across the region, Friendster announced Tuesday.

The deal involves several elements: Yahoo ads will be displayed on Friendster's Web site, Yahoo will allow Friendster profiles and fan pages to be listed and featured within its results, users can their link Friendster and Yahoo accounts, and a Friendster app will be available for Yahoo's Southeast Asia homepage.

The app, in particular, will display a user's Friendster activity and alerts from the search engine's homepage and browser-installed toolbar addon. The app is currently visible on Yahoo's Indonesian, Singaporean, Filipino and Malaysian homepages. Users from other countries can add the app manually from Yahoo's application directory, Friendster said in a statement.

Customized search and linking of user accounts will be live later this year, the social network said.

The latest move continues Friendster's push into the region, where it previously estimated that 90 percent of its traffic originates from Southeast Asia, The company was also recently acquired by a Malaysian company.

Yahoo, too, has emphasized local content for the region, offering news portals specific to several Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, Singapore and India.

Its Singapore-based headquarters for Asia and emerging markets serves as the company's fastest-growing global office, where Singapore pulls in the biggest revenues for the region, Yahoo said last November.

Late last year, Microsoft's Bing search engine also inked partnerships with Facebook and Twitter to bring real-time search results from the social networking sites to Bing. Google announced a similar deal shortly after 'late-stage'="" talks="" to="" buy="" twitter="" --="" friday,="" apr.="" 03,="" 2009"="" class="c-regularLink" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">with Twitter.