Sunnyvale, California — Internet pioneer Yahoo Inc. on Wednesday said that it is weaving tighter integration with Facebook that will further open its Internet properties to users of its email, photo-sharing and other online products link their content and activities directly into Facebook, the world’s largest social networking service.
The move tightens an alliance recently established when Yahoo home pages began presenting updates from people’s friends at the world’s most popular online social-networking service.
Yahoo’s expanded association with Facebook content is anticipated to begin in the first half of 2010, and will be combined with more of Yahoo’s online properties, will enable users to see their Facebook friends’ activities on Yahoo and share photos, article comments and other contents directly on the Facebook stream, according to Yahoo vice president of communities Jim Stoneham.
“With this association, we are opening the door for two of the Internet’s largest online communities to make it easier for people to stay connected," Stoneham said in a release.
“We are doing this by deeply combining a service called Facebook Connect across Yahoo properties worldwide,” Stoneham wrote in a posting on the company’s blog.
Yahoo’s support of the Facebook Connect service, which it said hopes to commence in the first half of 2010, represents an important move in Yahoo’s efforts to tap the popularity of social networking and underscores the growing clout of Facebook.
Yahoo asserts that more than 500 million people worldwide visit its websites monthly, while Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that the social-networking service’s population has topped 350 million.
“Yahoo! is a perfect partner to integrate with Facebook Connect, enabling users to share meaningful content with their friends on Facebook from Yahoo’s wide range of category-leading properties,” said Facebook developer network director Ethan Beard.
Currently, users can recall their Facebook activity streams and post status updates from the Yahoo home page. Yahoo also offers choice to share certain Yahoo content on Facebook.
However, at some point in the first half of next year, an all-encompassing implementation of Facebook’s Connect technology across Yahoo will increase the integration points between the two sites.
Facebook Connect, which was unveiled last year, offers a universal ID that enables users to automatically sign in to participating sites with their Facebook credentials.
Yesterday’s announcement takes the alliance between Yahoo and Facebook a step further, by automatically following activities carried out on Yahoo sites, such as photos shared on Yahoo’s Flickr, into the Facebook news feed.
Yahoo’s move comes as the company seeks to refresh its development under the leadership of CEO Carol Bartz, who took the leadership in January and announced a controversial deal to hand off the operation of its Internet search technology to Microsoft Corp in July.
A 10-year unfinished Web search and advertising partnership announced in July under which Yahoo online searches will be powered by Microsoft’s new Bing engine, sets the platform for a joint Yahoo!-Microsoft offensive against Internet titan Google, the leader in the lucrative search and advertising market.
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