Yahoo! synchs more websites with Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO, California – Yahoo! on Tuesday announced that it has ramped up the number of its websites around the world that let visitors automatically share what stories they read with Facebook friends.

A feature added in September to Yahoo! News in the United States has been extended to 26 more of the California Internet pioneers websites around the world.

“This is a first step toward using what your friends are talking about as a meaningful source of programming what you are consuming on Yahoo!,” said Yahoo! vice president of social and personalization Michael Kerns.

The feature has been introduced in at Yahoo! News sites in other countries and added to the California company’s entertainment-oriented US websites omg!, Yahoo! TV, Yahoo! Movies, and Yahoo! Games.

“As the world’s most popular online news destination, Yahoo! News delivers the most compelling content on the Web through a combination of local editors, advanced technologies, and now, your friends,” said chief product officer Blake Irving.

Yahoo! aimed to have the feature woven into 100 of its properties next year.

“It is going to be really interesting to see the growth in different regions,” said Yahoo! vice president of social and personalization Michael Kerns.

“In the US, Yahoo! and Facebook each reach almost all the audience,” he continued. “In some other regions Facebook is bigger than Yahoo! so we will see if it leads to a meaningful shift (in traffic to Yahoo!).”

More than 12 million people have opted to automatically share activity at Yahoo! News with Facebook friends since the social network announced in September the creation of a new class of applications at the service.

“We saw greater adoption than we anticipated,” Kerns told Agence France-Presse.

Online traffic from Facebook to Yahoo! News pages more than tripled as people checked out stories their friends had read, according to Kerns. The feature proved particularly popular with people younger than 35 years old.

Yahoo! also added an alert atop US pages to let people know when selected stock prices change or others have responded to comments posted about online stories.