Yahoo! has announced that by the first half of 2010, they will integrate all their properties with Facebook via Facebook Connect.
Yahoo! users will be able to view the activities of their Facebook friends on Yahoo! and at the same time Yahoo! content will be accessible on Facebook.
This integration will make it possible for Yahoo! users (500 million across the globe) to keep in touch with all their friends and access their social activities from a single site.
Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Finance and Flickr will all be accessible directly through Facebook Connect and users will have the choice of updating their status messages either from Facebook itself or through any of the Yahoo! sites.
Due to this integration users will be able to add comments, share news with each other or access their friend’s news feeds by accessing Facebook through Yahoo!, thus giving a much larger audience to Yahoo!
For a while now, Yahoo! had been discussing the possibility of integrating their social features such as email, address book and messenger with each other, but as of now they have decided to simply outsource these services to Facebook. They have thus lost the opportunity to monetise their own social network.
