IM This Article
A new feature popped up recently on Yahoo! News articles. Right next to the “Email Story” link at the bottom of each story is an “IM Story” link. Click on it and up pops a Yahoo! Messenger IM box with the message already populated with “Check out this story on Yahoo! News: Article Title http://news.yahoo.com/articleURL.” All you have to do is enter a recipient and hit send. If you are not logged into Messenger, it will launch it for you.
This is a tool that can be used to create a rapid viral spread of news throughout country. An advocacy campaign with a grassroots email can use the news story to virally drive activists to write policymakers by adding a link to their tool to the message and asking people to send a message after reading the article. If you also ask people to forward the IM message to everyone on their list, pretty soon you have thousands of people taking action.
Yahoo! added the “IM Story” function when it relaunched Yahoo! News this past April. Yahoo! sees this feature as another example of how they incorporate high quality content with advanced technology.
- Posted in: Digital Politics
