Yahoo Tightens Facebook Ties in Latest Social Offensive

According to Yahoo, the tighter Facebook integration -- coming on the heels of previous Yahoo-Facebook announcements in December and March -- will also mean easier sharing of Yahoo-owned content like Flickr and Yahoo Movies by Facebook users.

Cody Simms, senior director of social platforms and Yahoo Developer Network at Yahoo, said the move "offers great benefit to people across the web, and it's key to helping Yahoo extend our reach and increase engagement."

"More and more, people rely on social sites to share and discover information that matters to them, making Yahoo uniquely positioned to provide people with all of the mainstream methods of content discovery -- social, search, communications and editorial," Simms said in a statement. "Starting with Facebook, we are bringing all these elements together to give people one simple, trusted place to share information and connect."

In December, Yahoo said it had integrated Facebook Connect with several Yahoo sites, including Yahoo Mail and Yahoo News. And in March, Yahoo further enabled Yahoo Mail customers easy access to Facebook accounts and direct Facebook status updates through Yahoo.

It's part of a broader push by Yahoo to use social networking as an advantage against rivals like Google and Microsoft's Bing search platform, and in its Monday statement, Yahoo listed off "upcoming and recent milestones" in that push, including its acquisitions of Koprol and Citizen Sports, its continued integration with Facebook, and the February-announced partnership with Twitter.

In an additional note on privacy -- perhaps inevitable in the age of the daily Facebook privacy lampoon -- Yahoo also stated that it is "deeply committed to privacy, not just as a written policy but as a fundamental consideration applied to each and every Yahoo site and service."