Yahoo to unify user profiles

Yahoo Inc. is working to rewire the dozens of services across its site so that users can manage all information about themselves in a single place and share it with friends across the Web.

"We are not building another social network," Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh told more than 1,000 attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco on Thursday. "We are building social into everything we do."

The effort is part of a larger plan to make it easier for users to share information about themselves with other Yahoo users and on Web sites that build applications using Yahoo features, seeking to help the world's biggest Web media company keep pace with social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

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"We are literally in the process of rewiring Yahoo from the inside out," Balogh said. Unified user profiles and the effort to make it easier for users to share information with their friends is part of Yahoo's broader "Y!OS" strategy due out later this year, he said.

Sticking to its independent course in the face of Microsoft Corp's unsolicited takeover offer, Balogh said the unification plan would give Yahoo users privacy controls to decide what data they reveal about themselves. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

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"We are going to unify all profiles throughout Yahoo," said Balogh, whose appointment as Yahoo's CTO was announced on January 29, a day before Microsoft proposed its $31 a share cash and stock offer to merge with Yahoo.

Microsoft has set a deadline of Saturday for Yahoo to agree to a deal on those terms or face a hostile takeover campaign.