On October 3, ABC News and Yahoo announced a partnership to deliver more online news to their audiences. With the deal, ABC News content will be prominently featured on Yahoo News. The deal helps ABC grow its online reach and helps Yahoo drive further traffic to its own site by featuring original, made-for-online content. ABC launched a Web-only news series, starting with a live interview with President Barack Obama, and plans to feature online interviews conducted by Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Katie Couric, Robin Roberts and others.

Then, October 5, Microsoft joined a list of companies considering a bid for Yahoo.

We used Social Radar to analyze how each of these stories affected Yahoo buzz.

Yahoo buzz

Yahoo buzz had been steadily declining for the past three years. Following the recent announcements buzz has nearly doubled.

Yahoo sentient

Conversations around Yahoo have been 71% positive over the last 30 days. Microsoft is currently appearing in 11% of Yahoo conversations.

How would a Yahoo-Microsoft partnership change the game? Could Bing and Yahoo together beat Google in the search game?

Microsoft is reportedly spending $100 million+ marketing Bing, signing partnerships with ESPN and Jay-Z.

Bing vs. Yahoo vs. Google chatter

Google is currently generating more than 20x more chatter online than Bing. Google is also generating more than double the chatter of Yahoo, which just announced its second round of layoffs in two months.

Bing vs. Yahoo vs. Google sentiment

Although Bing is generating considerable less chatter, conversations around Bing are more positive (87%) than conversations around both Google (79%) and Yahoo (78%).

Google conversation topic cloud 1/18 – 1/25

Last week Google announced that co-founder Larry Page would be replacing Eric Schmidt as CEO. Page has been mentioned in 33% of Google-related posts within the past week. How will the CEO swap affect Google moving forward?

In Buzz 10, we use Social Radar to determine the 10 most buzzed about topics across the web via Twitter, blogs, discussion boards, media, and social networks. For this Buzz 10, we analyzed chatter around Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2010, Alexa Rankings, and other popular websites to determine the top 10 most talked about websites in 2010.

10. Flickr

The popular image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.

9. WordPress

WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS), often used as a blog publishing application. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system and is used by over 13% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites.

8. MSN

MSN (originally The Microsoft Network) is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft.

7. Yahoo!

Yahoo! is best known for its web portal, search engine, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, and social media websites and services.

6. Amazon

Amazon.com is America’s largest online retailer.

5. Tumblr

Tumblr is a microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users can follow other users, or choose to make their tumblelog private. The service emphasizes ease of use.

4. Facebook

With more than 500 million active users, a blockbuster movie and millions of links, photos, comments, wall posts and ‘likes’ happening every day, 2010 was a big year for the social network service.

3. Google

Google continues to expand on its Internet-based services, which now include real-time search.

2. YouTube

YouTube users have uploaded more than 13 million hours of video content to its servers in the last 12 months, resulting in more than 700 billion YouTube video views — which means that YouTube’s users have uploaded 850,000 minutes of video and watched 1.9 billion videos per day in the past year.

1. Twitter

Twitter grew exponentially in 2010 thanks to support from major celebrities and the masses, enabling users to follow and connect based on common interests. Twitter enables its users to send and read messages called tweets, text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user’s profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their followers. News sources from ESPN to TMZ to CNN regularly rely on tweets during news broadcasts.

Facebook today announced its new modern messaging system, with an intent to make communication simpler. According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, modern communication needs to be seamless, informal, immediate, personal,  simple, minimal and short. The new product includes seamless messaging, conversation history, and a social inbox, and provides a way to communicate no matter what format you want to use: email, chat, SMS. Zuckerberg said that 15 engineers worked on this product — the most that have ever worked on a single Facebook project.

Many speculated leading up to the announcement that Facebook would be announcing a Gmail killer, taking a direct shot at competitor Google. The new messaging system is “not an email killer” according to Zuckerberg, but the new service could transform email by melding messaging functions with people’s social connections to provide a more personal and intuitive experience. The new service would allow its more than 500 million members to communicate with anyone inside or outside the walls of the social network. Microsoft’s Hotmail, in contrast, has 361 million global users, followed by Yahoo Mail’s 273 million users and Gmail’s 193 million users, according to comScore.

Chatter around Facebook has been 77% positive in the last 24 hours.

Both Google and Facebook have launched features within the last year in direct competition, including Google’s “Facebook killer” Google Me.

We analyzed chatter around both Google and Facebook within the last year. In November 2009, Google was clearly generating more chatter online than Facebook. Today, the two have nearly swapped positions, with Google’s chatter steadily declining while Facebook chatter increased throughout the past year.

Will Facebook’s new messaging system take users from Google’s Gmail service and increase the social networking site’s popularity even more?

The September 2009 Social Radar Top 50 measures the brands with the most active Web presence based on overall online conversation volume. To create the Top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during September 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during September 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand.

Twitter falls a bit, but still takes top spot. LG’s new BL20 Chocolate helped LG jump 11 spots. NFL rises again this month as the NFL season heats up. MTV jumps 13 spots due to buzz around the MTV Video Music awards. AT&T’s announcement of MMS support on the iPhone raised AT&T’s position up 5 spots.

Rank	Chg	Brand
1		Twitter
2	(+1)	Facebook
3	(-1)	iPhone
4		Google
5	(+1)	Obama
6	(-1)	YouTube
7	(+1)	Apple
8	(-1)	Mac
9		iPod
10		MySpace
11		Microsoft
12	(+11)	LG
13	(+6)	NFL
14	(-1)	Windows
15	(-3)	Yahoo
16	(+1)	Fox
17	(+13)	MTV
18	(-4)	Disney
19	(-4)	BlackBerry
20	(-4)	Playstation
21	(+5)	AT&T
22	(-1)	BBC
23	(-5)	XBox
24	(-2)	Amazon
25	(-5)	Sony
26	(+3)	CNN
27	(+1)	Wii
28	(-2)	Nokia
29	(-2)	Linux
30	(+2)	Starbucks
31		eBay
32	(+5)	Skype
33	(-9)	Firefox
34	(-1)	ABC
35		Oprah
36		ESPN
37	(-3)	Ford
38	(-3)	Dell
39		UPS
40		Samsung
41	(+3)	NBA
42		Intel
43		Nike
44	(-6)	Wikipedia
45	(-4)	MLB
46	(-1)	Canon
47	(-4)	Marvel
48		CBS
49	(-1)	BMW
50	(-3)	Nintendo

View the full list below, or download the PDF. For additional information about how you can analyze chatter sentiment to gauge positivity/negativity, view key words mentioned about your brand and identify key influencers, visit www.infegy.com/socialradar.

Questions or comments? Twitter me @adamcoomes.