Los Angeles — Since last December, Yahoo is continuing its love affair with a treasure-trove of Facebook-related features added to Yahoo! Mail, another move towards deeper integration; now, the company rolling out a new feature that would allow Facebook enthusiasts to view, comment, and integrating Facebook news feed items directly into Yahoo Mail, actions that will sync with your activity on Facebook.com.
The move is another step forward in Yahoo’s attempt to keep abreast with competitors in social networking without relying on a social network it builds itself.
“Facebook operations from your friends will now be displayed in your Updates section, next to your friends’ activity on Yahoo, Twitter, Flickr and so on. Now you can get all your Updates in one place, right when you log in to Yahoo Mail,”” Yahoo wrote in a blog post.
Yahoo Mail already has an “Updates section,” which delivers the status updates from your contacts in the Yahoo network. But currently, some Yahoo users will be able to see and respond to updates from the Facebook news feed within the Yahoo email platform. Other users will be receiving the features in the coming weeks.
And, since Yahoo Updates aggregates these statuses from friends and family as well as friends’ activity that is collected from other sites like Flickr, Twitter and Yahoo!, it is already a great way of keeping up with your friends no matter where they hanged around. This unification also enables members to acquire all their Updates in one place itself without needing to navigate to other pages.
Yahoo Mail users can now view their Facebook news feed from the inbox.
By default, when a particular news feed is commented upon or “Liked” directly from Yahoo! Mail, the comment returns to Facebook for everyone to see. You will see Yahoo and Facebook updates incorporate with one another via the “All” tab, but if you want to see only Yahoo or only Facebook updates, click the corresponding tabs for a more filtered view. Updates are presented in real-time; a “show new updates” alert will appear when news feeds are updated.
Last year, the company rolled out its own “updates” feature into Yahoo mail and connected people with some other services, such as Twitter and photo site Flickr. But the Sunnyvale, Calif. company’s attempts to let people to use its own update service did not get much traction, and neither did earlier Yahoo attempts to build social-networking services. But the site now believes its value lies in making partnerships to aggregate content from elsewhere.
“We are more of an aggregator rather than a core social network,” said Jason Titus, vice president of Yahoo’s communications division, which includes its email service. “If you want to do deep things in Facebook you go to Facebook,” he added.
With the whole Facebook News Feed at your disposal, though, Yahoo Mail has just become a lot more interesting. All the activity that is displayed in Mail just as they do on Facebook. Yahoo and Facebook announced an alliance at the end of last year, which would bring all manner of Facebook data and features to Yahoo properties.
For one, Yahoo Mail has seen a number of Facebook-themed features starting with the contacts import tool to enabling users to post Facebook status updates from the Mail app. You can also comment on the items or like them and the actions are instantly synced with the social network. Normally, the updates from both Yahoo and Facebook is displayed in the same flow, but you can view them separately as well, if you want to.
“When they participate with this, the amount of time spent on the network goes way up,” Titus said of the social-networking feeds in email. The hope now is that Yahoo users will engage.
To activate this feature, you must link your Facebook account to your Yahoo account. More information about that is available on Yahoo.