Pac-Man never dies

Yahoo and Nokia announced an extended partnership in New York today. The companies hosted a fancy press conference at the New York City NASDAQ for news that is relatively unfancy.

The news is that Yahoo will power mail, chat, and maps in Nokia devices. That's nice I suppose. It will have somewhat of an impact on developing countries and overseas where Nokia phones are popular.

The bigger news is what Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said as a non sequitur during the event: that Yahoo products will get more social features integrated in the next few weeks.

Yahoo has experimented with social features inside Mail but the company has yet to make a splash in social media. Yahoo is good at one-to-one communication such as Messenger and Mail, but not so good at one-to-many communication like Facebook or Twitter.

What Yahoo does have is a humongous userbase, most of whom know how to use social networking. If the company can successfully leverage that userbase, it could succeed as a social meeting place. It would take a lot of attention grabbing though, which would necessitate way more cool points than Yahoo has these days.

Other links from Monday afternoon's episode of Loaded:

Twitter bans third-party ads in your Twitter feed

Halo: Reach gets a release date of September 14

Pandigital releases the Novel e-reader

Google will keep the 30th anniversary Pac-Man game up in perpetuity

Sony launches a Billabong-designed Vaio in Australia