Facebook burrows deeper into Yahoo Mail

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 30 Mar 2010 at 09:19

Yahoo Mail will allow users to update their Facebook status through their inbox, as Yahoo continues to weave social-networks into its web services.

To access the feature users will need to connect their Yahoo Mail and Facebook accounts, but once done emails from friends will automatically drag in Facebook information, including profile pictures and current status.

Users can also update their Facebook status from within the webmail service. It follows the ability introduced last month to import the email addresses of Facebook friends to Yahoo contacts.

Yahoo has made a priority of becoming a social-networking hub since Carol Bartz took over as chief executive in January 2009. One of her first acts was to oversee a radical redesign of the Yahoo homepage intended to make the site "a front door" through which web users could access Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Yahoo will be rolling out the feature "in selected markets" over the coming weeks, though it offered no details on what those markets are, or the timeframe of the roll-out.