Social networks have seen explosive growth in recent years. As the place that 600 million people visit every month, Yahoo! is in a unique position to bring together different social experiences from across the Web to a single place. This vision has been our guiding principle since we kicked off our Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) initiative in 2008 and started to rewire Yahoo! to be more open and social.

Starting this week, we will be bringing this vision to life in the Yahoo! products you use every day.  We are starting to integrate Facebook in a big way, a result of the agreement we first signed with Facebook last December. People who use Yahoo! and Facebook can now link their accounts to view and share updates with friends across both networks.  This means you can see your Facebook News Feed from your Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Mail, and other favorite Yahoo! sites and services.  When you create and share content on our properties – including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Answers, and many of our entertainment sites, such as omg!, Yahoo! TV, and Yahoo! Music – you can share that content on Facebook.

Beyond Facebook, your activities on Yahoo! are another important way of bringing social experiences together. Globally, Yahoo! now has more 80 sites producing socially infused content, including three million photos and videos uploaded daily to Flickr, 1.1 million answers provided daily on Yahoo! Answers, and thousands of comments posted daily on articles across Yahoo! sites. These social actions – what we call Yahoo! Updates – can be found in many places across Yahoo!, within products you use and on Yahoo! pages you visit every day.

Our vision is to provide a central hub for people’s online lives, and we understand that requires a Web you can trust.  That’s why this week Yahoo! is making privacy settings even easier to use with a central dashboard.  Rolling out this week as a re-fresh of Yahoo! Profiles, Yahoo! Pulse is a dashboard that makes it simple to set and manage your activities and privacy on Yahoo!.

Expect more to come and until then, share, update your status, and tell us what you think.

Jim Stoneham, Vice President of Communities

Cody Simms, Senior Director, Yahoo! Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN)