Yahoo! Likes the Taste of BlackBerry

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Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) may be the popular kid, but Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) seems to be striking all of the deals lately. Now you can add BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM) to that list.

Yesterday, RIM agreed to make it easier to expand the use of four Yahoo! services on BlackBerry devices. Those services are Yahoo! Go, to synch personal information and make it available anywhere; Yahoo! Mail; Yahoo! Search; and Yahoo! Messenger.

The deal comes on the heels of a pact with CBS (NYSE: CBS), which agreed to make unique content from its 60 Minutes TV newsmagazine available to Yahoo! News readers. Though the partnership doesn't explicitly say so, it's already easy to get Yahoo! News content by way of a Treo. Video clips from 60 Minutes can't be that far off, can they? I don't think so.

Here's my point: Both of these deals are shrewd and may help in the fight against Google. Think about it: Google is an aggregator and organizer, not a creator. Yahoo!, meanwhile, has been doing mobile content for years and is really, really good at it. (Try Yahoo! Finance on the go sometime. It's pretty sweet.)

That said, the RIM agreement isn't without drawbacks. For example, of Yahoo!'s goodies, only Yahoo! Search is automatically available to BlackBerry users. The rest either have to be configured or downloaded. And Yahoo! Mail is currently available only to T-Mobile customers. That makes these moves something less than a dagger to the heart of Google.

But it won't hurt Yahoo!, either. By combining unique content with a pervasive mobile strategy via a device popularly dubbed the "CrackBerry," Yahoo! has put itself front and center in mobile content, which looks to be the next hypergrowth market. Investors can't ask for much more than that, right?

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Fool contributor Tim Beyers didn't owns shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story at the time of publication. You can find out what is in his portfolio by checking Tim's Fool profile . The Motley Fool has an ironclad disclosure policy .

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11/6/2009 4:01 PM
CBS $12.72 Down -0.07 -0.55%
CBS Corp CAPS Rating: **
GOOG $551.10 Up +2.45 +0.45%
Google, Inc. CAPS Rating: ***
RIMM $58.72 Up +0.93 +1.61%
Research In Motion… CAPS Rating: ***
YHOO $15.94 Up +0.04 +0.25%
Yahoo!, Inc. CAPS Rating: **

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