Yahoo said today that it is expanding its Facebook social sharing feature to 26 more Yahoo sites around the world, meaning there are now more options to automatically share the Yahoo stories you're reading with Facebook friends.
That includes Yahoo TV, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo Games, and blog properties like omg, as well as Yahoo News sites around the world.
Back at September's f8 developer conference, Facebook unveiled new partnerships with music and entertainment companies that allowed Facebook users to link up and share what they were doing outside Facebook. Watch an episode of "30 Rock" on Hulu and share that on your profile, or listen to a song on Spotify and automatically alert your friends. Similarly, the Yahoo deal shares the stories that you're reading on Yahoo News via Facebook.
In a blog post today, Mike Kerns, vice president of social and personalization for Yahoo, said the company has seen a 300 percent traffic boost from Facebook to Yahoo News since the feature was implemented about two months ago.
"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," Kerns wrote.
The new additions will likely provide users the option to share the movies they're perusing on Yahoo Movies, for example, or the games they're playing on Yahoo Games.
"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," Kerns wrote.
Yahoo also said it will add a Notifications button across Yahoo in the U.S., which will alert you when you've received feedback on a review, response to comments, stock alerts, and more.
There are, of course, some privacy concerns that crop up when automatic sharing is involved. Do you really want all your Facebook friends to know that you read three Justin Bieber articles today? Luckily, the service is opt-in. You have to add an app to your Facebook profile before auto-shares commence, and if there is something you want to read privately, you can temporarily shut down sharing via Yahoo.
But if a friend reads a Yahoo article and it shows up on your news feed, you also have to have the app installed before you can read it. You can't just click and go directly to the story on Yahoo News. This prompted CNET's Molly Wood to say in a recent column that Facebook had ruined sharing. But in a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg said this type of sharing is the future of Facebook.
Going forward, instead of just telling people how you feel or what you had for dinner, you can share your interests more deeply with apps that bring in your activity from across the Web. "Do you want to go to the movies by yourself or with your friends?" Zuckerberg asked.
Do you agree with Zuckerberg? Have you found Yahoo News (or Spotify, Hulu, etc.) auto-sharing helpful, creepy, annoying, or none of the above? Let us know in the comments.