14 DAY TRIAL // One of the more popular and fairly distinctive features on Yahoo is the custom avatar users can create. It’s been a staple of Yahoo’s social efforts even as those ambitions dwindled. These days, Yahoo is pretty happy integrating social features from third-parties, notably Facebook, but the avatars remain. Not only that, but Yahoo has been working with Facebook to allow users to export their avatar over to the social network and use it there as well.
“Yahoo! users love their avatars, and millions of users use an avatar as their profile picture on their Yahoo! Pulse (formerly Yahoo! Profile) page. We wanted to let users use them also on their other favorite social destinations, such as Facebook, Twitter, and so on,” Yahoo announced in a blog post.
“As Yahoo! began working on a partnership with Facebook, we were able to move this forward. We’re glad to announce that you can now export your Yahoo! Avatar to the Facebook album, and then select it as your profile picture on Facebook,” the announcement added.
There are a few steps and requirements for exporting your avatar to Facebook. First of all, the Yahoo and Facebook accounts must be linked, this is something users may have already done to enable them to post updates to the social network from Yahoo properties like the homepage and Mail.
Then, users must visit the Avatar Export page, where they will be able to preview their current avatar and upload it to Facebook. A new photo album will be created to house the avatar image. Finally, you can select the image and use it as your Facebook profile photo.
Yahoo says it plans to expand the functionality to update the image on Facebook every time you alter your avatar. It’s also looking beyond Facebook towards other social networks to bring the feature to places like Twitter.