OREANDA-NEWS. September 29, 2008. Yandex started informing its users about new messages they receive on social networking websites Vkontakte (In Contact) and Odnoklassniki (Classmates). Users can access their social networking profiles and read new messages by clicking through Yandex’s front page.

A similar functionality became available to those Yandex users blogging on Livejournal.com: now they can see the number of new replies and comments to their posts left on this blog hosting service right at www.yandex.ru.

The Yandex.Mail notification counter at www.yandex.ru updates the number of received messages automatically based on email analysis. To be able to receive notifications, users are not required to provide Yandex with any additional information like passwords for their social networking profiles. The only thing required is to enable message redirection from their accounts on networking sites to their Yandex.Mail account.

"Social networks have prominently established themselves on the Yandex.Mail radar over the past year. Notifications from social networking services currently account for more than 20 per cent of our users’ email traffic,” says Anton Zabannykh, head of the networking services group at Yandex. “We value our users’ time and don’t want them to waste a single click, and we want to enhance their experience by aggregating all the important things, like recent news, new messages or notifications from social networking sites, on a single page – Yandex’s front page.”

Currently, Yandex’s front page notifies its users about messages from Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte and Livejournal.com. Going forward, Yandex has plans to add more networking services to the list.

Yandex users can receive notifications from social networks either by logging on to www.yandex.ru, or even without opening a browser window. They can use the Ya.Online instant messenger, which has been offering the opportunity to view notifications since September 15, 2008.