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"We are not building another social network," chief technology officer Ari Balogh told more than 1,000 attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco. "We are building social into everything we do."

The effort is part of a larger plan to make it easier for users to share information about themselves with other Yahoo users and on third party sites that build applications using Yahoo features, seeking to help the world's biggest web media

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company keep pace with social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

"We are literally in the process of rewiring Yahoo from the inside out," Balogh said.

Unified user profiles and the effort to make it easier for users to share information with their friends are part of Yahoo's broader "Y!OS" strategy due out later this year, he said.

Sticking to its independent course in the face of Microsoft's unsolicited takeover offer, Balogh said the unification plan would give Yahoo users privacy controls to decide what data they reveal about themselves.

"We are going to unify all profiles throughout Yahoo," said Balogh, whose appointment as Yahoo's CTO was announced on 29 January, a day before Microsoft proposed its $31 a share cash and stock offer to merge with Yahoo.

Microsoft has set a deadline of Saturday for Yahoo to agree to a deal on those terms or face a hostile takeover campaign.