• Reuters, Wednesday, April 8, 2009 12:15 PM

If Yahoo co-founder David Filo and CEO Carol Bartz have their way, then the Web giant's online properties will soon look a lot like Facebook, Reuters says in a new report. The company hopes the new strategy will help bring Yahoo's disparate properties together, and reel in new advertising and user growth.

Analysts said that advertisers would follow if Yahoo's social networking features catch on with users. "People are spending time on Twitter and Facebook, but advertisers don't want to be there right now. That's the big issue," said JMP Securities analyst Sameet Sinha. "But Yahoo advertisers are already there." Yahoo has a lot to gain from luring its existing user base to other Yahoo services. The company notes that more than half of its users only use a handful of Yahoo sites. In the next several months, Yahoo plans to roll out new versions of its more popular products, from Yahoo Mail to the Yahoo homepage. These will be threaded together through a common user profile and list of friends, complete with status updates and other features a la Facebook. According to Reuters, Yahoo is developing technology to broadcast 100 types of posts and actions.

Yahoo's properties still rank among the most popular on the Web. It's homepage had 329 million unique users in February, according to comScore, while Yahoo Mail had 282 million uniques.

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