Share your TV habits with Yahoo's IntoNow app, on iPad

Yahoo is bringing IntoNow, a mobile application that can detect what TV program you're watching and let you share the information via Twitter or Facebook, to the iPad.

And it's expanding IntoNow's functionality, integrating it with other Yahoo Web properties. So now IntoNow can not only detect that you're watching CNN, for example, but then use the close caption feed to search the Web and surface relevant articles about the topic of a news segment.

IntoNow, which Yahoo acquired in April, is a bit like the music application Shazam, with which users can determine song titles by playing a tune off the radio into their mobile phone's microphone. With IntoNow, audio from a program gets run through a content-recognition server, and in 4 to 12 seconds, the program is identified.

But rather than just sharing what you're watching, which is what the current iPhone app does, users can now receive content specific to those programs. And it's not just news.

Viewers watching a football game, for example, can tap IntoNow to dig out specific information about the teams playing and up-to-the-minute statistics about the players. Tap IntoNow into a Family Guy episode, for example, and you'll get a screen that brings up the Twitter feeds of the shows creators.

The size of the iPad makes it possible.

"It gives us a bigger palette to play with," said Adam Cahan, Yahoo's vice president of media products. About Jay Greene
Jay Greene, a CNET senior writer, works from Seattle and covers Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. He's the author of the book, Design Is How It Works: How the Smartest Companies Turn Products into Icons (Penguin/Portfolio). He started writing about Microsoft and technology in 1998, first as a reporter for The Seattle Times and later as BusinessWeek's Seattle bureau chief.