April 15, 2008 2:14 PM PDT

Facebook mini-feeds get hungrier: Yelp, Picasa, Flickr, Delicious

Posted by Caroline McCarthy

Importing my Flickr feed into Facebook

(Credit: Facebook)

This post was updated at 2:54 PM PT with comment from Facebook.

Facebook members now have the options to import their activity from a number of external social-media sites into the "Mini-Feeds" on their profiles, a post on the company blog explained on Tuesday.

Currently, this is limited to business reviews site Yelp, bookmarking site Delicious (owned by Yahoo), and photo-sharing sites Flickr (also owned by Yahoo) and Picasa (owned by Google). More are on the way, including Digg, the post by engineer Harry Huai Wang assured members.

With aggregation the hottest topic in social networking these days, plenty of sites from Pownce to Plaxo have opted to let members pull in feeds from external sites, and an entire genre of "lifestreaming" services like FriendFeed and SocialThing have sprung up for those social-media junkies who want to be able to track everything their friends do in one place.

But it's a bit curious on Facebook: most popular social-media sites already have applications built on Facebook's developer platform, and those can pull updates into the Mini-Feed--so at first glance, it seems slightly redudant.

Using the Mini-Feed import, however, requires no application to be installed on Facebook (read: it's easier), and is fully opt-in, unlike Facebook's controversial Beacon advertisements (of which Yelp is a partner). I originally speculated that perhaps Yelp, Picasa, Flickr, and Delicious were "partners" in a Mini-Feed import program, meaning that Facebook may have gotten some revenue out of the deals.

But a Facebook representative confirmed to me that there were no formal partnerships in place, meaning that it was more likely just an API integration--curious.