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Back in September at Facebook’s f8 conference, we announced the Yahoo! News activity feature, putting your friends front and center in our U.S. Yahoo! News experience. And to our delight, more than 12 million of you have given it a try so far, discovering news stories and sharing what you are reading on Yahoo! with all your Facebook friends. Many of you who love to share your reading activity are young and socially-engaged (no surprise!), and this has quickly impacted the virality of Yahoo!’s content on Facebook, as demonstrated in their recent post about the most shared stories of 2011, showing that 12 of the 40 most shared stories this year came from Yahoo!. In business terms, we’ve seen traffic increase from Facebook to Yahoo! News more than300%.

Based on this success, we’re expanding this nifty Facebook integration to 26 more Yahoo! sites worldwide, including Yahoo! News sites spanning the globe from India to Brazil, Singaporeto Spainand beyond - and we’ve recently added it to US-based entertainment experiences, omg!, Yahoo! TV, Yahoo! Movies, and Yahoo! Games as well. The features are designed to bring a deeply personalized, social news experience to more of the content millions of people come to Yahoo! to read each day.

To build on this increasingly social content experience, an additional social feature, Notifications, has also launched in the US, alerting people to social conversations and other activity on Yahoo! that interest them such as feedback on reviews, responses to comments, and stock alerts. Notifications is found on the top of the page across most pages on Yahoo!, such as Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, omg!, Shine, and Yahoo! Travel.

We think this relatively new mode of discovering, navigating and enjoying news – through the lens of our friends – is reflective of how the Web is evolving today, and we’re excited to help your Yahoo! experience become even more personal for you.

Enjoy!

Mike Kerns, vice president of social and personalization, Yahoo!