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.