Sunnyvale, California — Last December, Yahoo announced that it would be unfurling deep integration of many of its popular products and services with Facebook Connect, essentially outsourcing all things social to the world’s most popular social network. Today marks the fulfillment of that promise of this partnership, with Yahoo Contacts now connected to Facebook.
The benefits are obvious. This indicates that not only Yahoo empowers you to import contacts from Gmail and Windows Live Hotmail, but now Yahoo allows you to add your Facebook friends’ email addresses to your Yahoo Contacts via Facebook Connect.
According to a post on the Yahoo Mail Blog that stated, “So when you are on Yahoo! Sports and you want to email your old high school buddy that great article on the Winter Olympics, his email address is just a click away. Or maybe you want to forward your cousin your airplane reservations on Yahoo! Mail . . . . [n]ow you can type the first few letters of his name in Yahoo! Mail and – presto! – his email address from his Facebook profile will appear in your email.”
The import process is pretty simple, too. Users merely need to head to the “Import Contacts” page, click on Facebook’s logo, enter their Facebook login info, and wait a few moments for all of the data to transfer.
As soon as you authorize the connection with your Facebook credentials, your friends? Yahoo will begin transferring your contacts, a process that may take a few minutes depending on your Internet speed and the number of friends you have. Yahoo will also look for any duplicates, and will delete them.
And Yahoo also lately added Twitter integration to its products as well. While this improvement will be enough to make Gmail or Hotmail users give Yahoo Mail a chance is hard to say, but this at least represents a significant step forward in terms of user-friendliness for existing Yahoo Mail fans.
Yahoo’s move with Facebook shows that the company has discontinued on leveraging the existing social connections among Yahoo email, address book and messenger users, and thus, weakens its ability to monetize this social graph. However, More tie-ups between Yahoo and Facebook are on the way, too, according to Andrew Molyneux, a program manager over Yahoo Mail.