Yahoo continues their strategic defeat from the front lines of innovation. Earlier today they announced that they'd be "deeply integrating" with Facebook Connect, allowing Yahoo users "to see your Facebook friends’ activities on Yahoo! and share Yahoo! content – ratings, photos, article comments, and more – directly on your Facebook stream." In other words, they've given up on their idea of leveraging all the known social connections among Yahoo email, address book and messenger users. Instead, they've outsourced all that social nonsense to Facebook. In April 2008 Yahoo unveiled it's plans to "re-wire Yahoo from the inside out...as part of this, we are going to make the consumer experience at Yahoo social throughout, and provide hooks for that for developers to do the same." This was the centerpiece of Yahoo's go-forward strategy. The company boasted 10 billion social connections among users, and they'd leverage that in the new Yahoo. As recently as two months ago Yahoo confirmed to me that they were still behind this social strategy, and would be making announcements soon. And their recent re-hire of Daniel Raffel convinced us they were being sincere: