Yahoo and Facebook partnership steps up a gear

Yahoo are to introduce further Facebook integration across their sites following the announced partnership between the pair. Yahoo users will be able to view their Facebook “news feed” within Yahoo Mail and Yahoo.com “in the coming days” according to the Wall Street Journal.

The news comes as part of a series of changes to Yahoo sites that will tie them more closely to Facebook. For instance, users of the Yahoo-owned Flickr will have the option of sending their uploaded photos to their Facebook profiles too.

Yahoo’s own Profiles service, their own attempt at social-networking, will also get a makeover. Redesigned and renamed Yahoo Pulse, it will introduce tabs for different social networking sties, grabbing status update information from multiple sources.

“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 – social, search, communications, and editorial,” said Cody Simms, senior director of Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN) at Yahoo!.

“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.”

It’s all part of a drive to get users to pass through Yahoo’s own network of sites. Since December, Yahoo have made it clear that social networking will be a key area of focus for them, adding Facebook Connect integration to the Yahoo Mail, News, Finances and Sports pages and thus making it easier to share Yahoo content through Facebook.

Yahoo Mail users already have the benefits of being able to update their status and log directly into Facebook from their mail accounts.