Inside Facebook

About six weeks ago, Facebook launched Feed Importing for the first time, allowing users to connect their Facebook accounts to Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, Delicious, and Digg and automatically syndicate their activity on those sites within their Facebook Mini Feed.

Today, Facebook announced Feed Importing compatibility with several new sites, including Google Reader, Hulu, YouTube, Last.fm, StumpleUpon, and Pandora. Thus, whenever you upload a YouTube video, rate a Hulu episode, or share a story in Google Reader, your activity stream will be automatically syndicated to your Facebook Mini Feed (and thus to your friends’ News Feeds).

In addition, and potentially more interesting, Facebook also today enabled general importing of any RSS feed into your Facebook Mini Feed. While Facebook users have previously been able to import their blog RSS into Notes for a long time, the new Feed Importer makes it easy to syndicate multiple feeds directly to your Mini Feed.

Like FriendFeed, Facebook is hoping to be able to become an important channel for content discovery and thus a major referrer of traffic on the web. While Facebook’s Posted Items/Share feature seems to have never achieved widespread adoption, Feed Importing is much more likely to succeed. By integrating with popular sites and automatically publishing activity, much more content should enter Facebook for distribution and discovery via the Mini & News Feeds.