In Facebook's vision of the future, everything we do is instantly shared with friends, to help them find things to read, movies to watch and so on. But this future is not really that far away, already, Facebook has partnered with music services, video streaming services and news sites.
One of these news sites is Yahoo and it's unveiling a new feature in Yahoo News which aims to show you what your friends are reading and share what you read with them.
The feature is not enabled by default, but it's an example of the new type of interaction and sharing the new Facebook's Open Graph enables.
Visitors to Yahoo News will be greeted with a message asking them to enable Yahoo News with friends, or "Social Editors," as Yahoo is calling them.
"The new Yahoo! News friends' activity feature lets people discover and connect around the news and information they are enjoying on Yahoo! seamlessly through updates on Facebook," Yahoo explained.
Your friend's activity on Yahoo News will show up near the top of the page as a list, the "facebar" as Yahoo calls it, displaying thumbnail photos of your friends and the stories they recently read.
The feature is opt-out, but its prominent display on top of Yahoo News should lead to a lot of adoption.
If you enable it, you'll get access to the recent activity of your friends, but you'll also share any story you read on Yahoo News with them. Individual stories can be removed from the list, but all stories are shared by default.
Any story you read will also show up in your friends' Facebook Ticker. You'll also see stories from them on Facebook. It's the perfect example of the Facebook Open Graph in action.
While services like Spotify got a lot more attention after Facebook unveiled the new Open Graph, Yahoo News will be the largest service to adopt it, with some 80 million unique monthly visitors.
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