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Yesterday Yahoo announced plans for a social media-based expansion into mobile, including an iPhone strategy and third party development tools.

Yahoo's oneConnect is now available on iPhone and iPod touch. The service, which debuted in spring, enables users to consolidate social media and mobile contact data, then send IMs, emails or text messages from one place. It also ports updates from social networks like Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.

And by expanding on a proprietary development language called Blueprint, Yahoo will also empower developers to build applications that work across most mobile devices, reports the San Francisco Gate. Apps can be accessed through Yahoo's Go mobile data service. They can also be built directly into select handhelds.

"We want to create and enable a mobile ecosystem for billions of users," said EVP Marco Boerries of Yahoo's Connected Life division. "We're turning everyone that uses voice today into a mobile data user."

Earlier this week AT&T announced plans to start using Yahoo as the default search engine on MEdia Net. Users with access to the portal can now pull news, weather reports and even flickr photos, courtesy of Yahoo's oneSearch feature.

Since its decision to focus aggressively on mobile in January 2007, Yahoo has chipped steadily away at Google's lead in the mobile market.

As of June, the latter served 61 percent of mobile searches. Yahoo held second place, with 18 percent of the market. Google is purportedly also in talks with Verizon Wireless, which is on the market for a solid mobile search engine.

In April Yahoo and Verizon crossed paths when they unveiled separate voice search tools for mobile — at the same time.