Yahoo Mail Gets Facebook Contacts Importer

The Yahoo - Facebook integration that was announced last December is beginning to take shape, with Yahoo announcing that users will now be able to import their Facebook friends into Yahoo Contacts. The move is significant not only for Yahoo, as it signals its increasing reliance on third-parties for social services, but also for Facebook, which has been reluctant in allowing outside parties access to its users' social graphs.

"In addition to importing your contacts from sites like Gmail and Windows Live Hotmail, starting this week you can now easily add your Facebook friends’ email addresses to your Yahoo! Contacts list. This will make it easy to communicate and share with the people you care about – wherever you are in Yahoo!," Andrew Molyneux, product manager for Yahoo Mail, wrote.

The new feature is now live in Yahoo Mail. Users are now seeing a message when visiting the Contacts tab, notifying them of the new feature and pointing them to the Contact Import tool. Even if they don't, they can click on the 'Import now' link and get to the same place. The actual process is pretty painless, clicking on the Facebook icon will pop up a window asking users to allow Yahoo access to Facebook's friends list. Yahoo Mail will then proceed to look through their Facebook connections, eliminate or merge existing contacts and add the rest to the Yahoo list.

It is likely that Yahoo hasn't implemented the vanilla Facebook Connect and that the social network has created a special tool as part of the partnership between the two. Most likely, this means that the move is a one-time deal and you won't start seeing Facebook contact import tools in any other services.

The move is a clear sign, though not the first, that Yahoo has given up on creating its own social services, something that the company readily admits. Yahoo signed a wide-reaching deal with Facebook last year and has also been working on Twitter integration. Whether the strategy pays off in the long term for Yahoo remains to be seen, but, for now, the company is focusing on its 'core' services.