Facebook Friends: Meet Yahoo! Contacts
You might have heard that Yahoo! announced plans in December to integrate Facebook Connect across a variety of our popular sites and services. While we're still early in the partnership, we wanted to let you know about one new thing you can do with Facebook today.
Context & Ripple Effects
A year ago Yahoo was positioning itself against Facebook's identity layer, with ReadWriteWeb reporting a major challenge to Facebook Connect in March 2009. The strategy has since inverted: after announcing a broad Facebook Connect partnership in December, Yahoo is shipping its first concrete piece of it — letting users surface and connect with Facebook friends directly inside Yahoo Contacts.
The move lands just as Facebook's reach across rival networks widens, with reports in December pointing to Facebook Connect becoming "everywhere" on MySpace. For Yahoo, whose mail contact book is one of its largest addressable assets, plugging into Facebook's graph is now worth more than defending an alternative one.
First-order effects
- Yahoo Contacts gains a Facebook-matching feature today, making the December partnership tangible for Mail users who can now find and connect with friends across both services.
Second-order effects
- With MySpace also expected to embed Facebook Connect broadly, portals and webmail providers face mounting pressure to integrate Facebook's graph rather than build competing identity layers.
Third-order effects
- If Yahoo and MySpace keep ceding the social graph to Facebook, the industry consolidates toward Facebook Connect as the default login-and-friends layer, leaving large portals to compete on content and communications rather than identity.
The trend: Large web portals are shifting from building proprietary social graphs to renting Facebook's through Connect integrations, with Yahoo's contacts book as the latest asset handed over.