Inbox 2.0 - The first step towards Inbox 2.0, Yahoo launches the FaceBook module | Weibo 2.0

Yahoo! now has a Facebook module that can be added to the "My Yahoo!" homepage. It provides basic information about your Facebook status, such as how many new messages you have (including pending friend requests, invitations, and "pokes" - a notification mechanism). This is a fairly interesting tool from Yahoo!, and it would be even better if it could aggregate more information from different social networking sites.

Currently, it seems to focus heavily on you as an individual user and the various activities happening within your personal network or inbox. It allows you to instantly access all the updates on your Yahoo! homepage that would normally appear in your Yahoo! inbox. This approach is quite different from the Facebook and Pageflakes modules for Gmail.

More importantly, it appears to be part of what could become Yahoo!'s "Inbox 2.0," at least I find it very useful on my Yahoo! homepage. It aims to bring users back to using Yahoo! services by finding innovative ways to recapture some of the market share lost to social networks, and by refining its underlying concept of showing the most relevant information to users based on their interpersonal networks. This Facebook module represents a good start in this larger strategy.