Facebook has made good on its promise to expand the site's "Mini Feed" feature, allowing users to import data from popular external services like Del.icio.us, Flickr, Yelp, Digg and Picasa.
Content aggregation, pulling in posts from a wide range of sites, is the current hotness among social websites and Facebook's new features are in many ways an answer to services like Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed and Iminta which offer similar capabilities.
But since Facebook is already more popular than the dedicated aggregation sites, the new features mean Facebook's competitors face an even tougher fight for users.
However, despite the fact that you can pull data into the mini feed, Facebook's importing support is still a limited. For instance, if you'd like to pull in your Flickr or Picasa photos and have them show up in you Facebook photo albums, you're out of luck. The images will show up in the mini feed, but that's it.
There are some third-party Facebook apps which can pull photos from Flickr and add them to your Facebook albums, but the best one I know of, Flickr2Facebook, is still a one-photo-at-a-time process, which isn't practical if you have thousands of images on Flickr (if anyone has a better alternative, let us know in the comments).
Still, despite the shortcomings of the new Facebook mini feed tools, the announcement should be welcome news for those pining for a richer Facebook experience. To use the new features just look for the "import" button at the top of your mini feed and get ready to hand over your passwords.
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