Yahoo Contacts Gets Facebook Connect

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Last December, Yahoo announced that it would be rolling out a deep integration of its products with Facebook Connect, essentially outsourcing all things social to the world’s most popular social network. Today marks one of the initial demonstrations of this partnership, with Yahoo Contacts now connected to Facebook.

Now Yahoo allows you to add your Facebook friends’ email addresses to your Yahoo Contacts via Facebook Connect. In the Import Contact landing page of your Yahoo account, you’ll be able to select Facebook (importing from Gmail and Hotmail already exists). Once you authorize the connection with your Facebook credentials, your friends’ email addresses from their Facebook profiles will be added to your Yahoo Contacts. Yahoo will scan the imports and delete any duplicates.

As we’ve written in the past, Yahoo’s move with Facebook shows that the company has given up on leveraging the existing social connections among Yahoo email, address book and messenger users, and thus, weakens its ability to monetize this social graph. And Yahoo also just added Twitter integration to its products as well. While Google’s Buzz may have its problems, at least Google is making an effort to try to develop technologies that use its communications products to build a social graph. Perhaps Yahoo CEO shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds her.

Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2004
IPO: NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Company: Yahoo!
Website: yahoo.com
Launch Date: January 1, 1994
IPO: December 4, 1996, Nasdaq:YHOO

Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It has since evolved into a major internet brand with search, content verticals, and other web services. Yahoo! Inc. (Yahoo!), incorporated in 1995, is a global Internet brand. To users, the Company provides owned and operated online properties and services (Yahoo! Properties, Offerings, or Owned and Operated sites). Yahoo! also extends its marketing platform and access to Internet users beyond Yahoo! Properties through its distribution network...

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