Yahoo and Facebook users around the world can now link their accounts to view and share updates with friends on both Web sites, Yahoo announced Monday.
Yahoo users can now view their Facebook News Feed via their Yahoo home page, Yahoo Mail, and other Yahoo sites, the company said. Additionally, content created on Yahoo sites, including Yahoo News, Sports, Movies and the photo-site Flickr, can be shared with friends on Facebook.
More Yahoo-Facebook integrations are also on the way, the company said.
The deal with Facebook is an effort “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,” Yahoo said in a statement.
Ethan Beard, director of Facebook Developer Network, was quoted in the Yahoo statement saying that, “by integrating with Facebook on a global scale, Yahoo is building upon an already valuable brand to give people easy ways to share the content they enjoy on Yahoo! with their friends on Facebook.”
Yahoo offered more details of the way people can connect with Facebook sites on its blog, but Facebook remained mum on the issue early Monday, without any details in its press center, blog or twitter feed. The most recent communications on these pages largely addressed privacy concerns.
Yahoo said it is making privacy settings easier to use with a central dashboard called Yahoo Pulse, but a link to the new dashboard could not be accessed as of the time of this writing.
Yahoo and Facebook first announced a plan to integrate services much more closely last December. At the time, Yahoo users in the U.S. were able to call up their Facebook activity streams and post status updates from the Yahoo home page, as well as use buttons to share certain Yahoo content. The companies promised much more this year via the use of Facebook’s Connect technology across Yahoo sites.