Folks who use both Yahoo and Facebook now have a wealth of integration options at their disposal: Yahoo has announced that users can now link with their Facebook accounts, enabling them see updates from friends across both networks, as well as share photos, news, status updates, and much more across both networks, from within either Yahoo or Facebook sites.
Yahoo’s Facebook integration amounts to a lot more than a status update area that appears on a handful of pages: users’ Facebook News Feeds can now appear on the Yahoo Home page, Yahoo Mail, and other Yahoo sites, and content on Yahoo sites like Flickr, Yahoo Movies, and Yahoo’s news and sports sites can be shared with Facebook friends.
“More and more, people rely on social sites to share and discover information that matters to them, making Yahoo uniquely positioned to provide people with all of the mainstream methods of content discovery,” said Yahoo Developer Network’s senior director for social platforms Cody Simms, in a statement. “Starting with Facebook, we are bringing all of these elements together to give people one simple, trusted place to share information and connect. We think this offers great benefit to people across the web, and it’s key to helping Yahoo extend our reach and increase engagement.”
Of course, lately Facebook has been roundly criticized for a series of mis-steps regarding user privacy. Yahoo says user privacy will be handled through a single, straightforward dashboard called Yahoo Pulse.
Yahoo’s move to integrate tightly with Facebook is part of a broader strategy to make Yahoo sites and services the center point from which Internet users orient their online lives: the news follows a partnership with online social gaming outfit Zynga, tie-ups with Twitter and earlier limited Facebook integrateion, acquisition of Indonesian social networking service Koprol.
