14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo has been getting very friendly with Facebook lately. It has just rolled out a deeper integration with the social network on Yahoo Mail and plenty of its other properties. And now Flickr, owned by Yahoo, is getting some Facebook love as well. The photo-sharing site now enables users to post their photos on Facebook automatically, as soon as they are uploaded.
“We’re always looking for new ways to make it easier for you to share your photos and videos with the people who matter to you. Today, we’re launching a new and improved way to share your Flickr photos with your friends and family on Facebook!,” Flickr’s Denise Leung announced.
“Just connect your Flickr and Facebook accounts and we’ll automatically send an update to your Facebook feed every time you upload a public photo or video,” she added.
All users have to do is connect their Facebook accounts to their Flickr ones. After that, any public photo they upload will be posted on their Facebook wall as well. This also works if the user just sets an existing photo’s visibility to public. Private photos on Flickr won’t end up public on Facebook and Yahoo is taking every extra step possible to ensure it doesn’t have a Google Buzz-type privacy disaster on its hands.
The new Facebook ‘sync’ feature is part of the broader effort at Yahoo to incorporate Facebook features. The sharing itself is actually powered by Yahoo Updates, the system that enables users to share their status updates on Yahoo and plenty of other sites and social networks. The tool also enables them to aggregate, in a way, the status updates and activities of their friends from various social networks, including Facebook.
Yahoo has given up on efforts to create its own social tools, but the features it is weaving into its sites and services and the integration with Facebook may be enough to slow down or maybe even stem the potential tide of users going over to the giant social networks to get all their news, share their photos and keep up with friends, things they used to do at Yahoo sites.