RAA Group

Yahoo Inc. said Wednesday it will soon integrate Facebook Connect into its many Web sites, allowing users to monitor their Facebook feeds while surfing the company’s sites.

It will also allow users to opt to have their Yahoo activity shown on their Facebook news feed.

Facebook users can already access their feeds on Yahoo’s homepage, and share some specific Yahoo content on Facebook. The new policy expands this to other Yahoo sites, including Flickr, as well as its Sports, News and Finance sites.

The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital blog reported the moves are part of a massive social networking update dubbed “Project Rushmore.”

It said similar changes could follow involving Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace, citing unnamed sources.

The New York Times reported that no money is changing hands in the Facebook-Yahoo move, with the companies instead getting a broader reach for their products.

“There is lot of potential future integration work we can do,” the Times quoted Yahoo spokesman Jim Stoneham as saying, adding that he described the arrangement as a “very deep long-term partnership.”

The changes are expected to be in place in the first half of 2010.

Facebook Inc. said Thursday that it won a $711 million damage award from Internet marketer Sanford Wallace for spamming its popular social networking site.

Palo Alto-based Facebook alleged that Wallace accessed its users’ accounts without permission and sent them phony posts and messages after accessing their accounts.

The company announced the damages award in a post on its blog Thursday night, saying the San Jose district court judge in the case also referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney’s office for prosecution for criminal contempt of court.

Wallace did not oppose the damages motion nor appear at the Sept. 18 hearing, according to a court filing.

Facebook’s General Counsel Sam O’Rourke wrote in the blog posting, “While we don’t expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals.”

The Wallace case marks the second large anti-spam award Facebook has won in the past year. It was awarded $873 million a year ago from Adam Guerbuez and his business, Atlantis Blue Capital, who bombarded users with sexually explicit spam messages.