Yahoo Messenger is certainly one of the primitive IM clients out there but certainly not the best one.

With time, good IM clients like Digsby and Imo.im have taken over who allow you to chat with Facebook, Twitter, Gtalk, Jabber, Windows Live and friends from other social networks all at one place. Yahoo messenger is still popular among old computer users who prefer chatting  with online friends.

Recently,Yahoo team put another step forward in social integration by allowing Yahoo mail users to chat with Facebook friends from Yahoo messenger. This is cool, you don’t need to fire up a web browser just for the sake of chatting with Facebook friends.

Now here is some more good news for Yahoo fans,who want to chat with Facebook friends directly from Yahoo mail web interface.

Yahoo has recently integrated Facebook chat within Yahoo mail’s web interface which means you can simply connect your Yahoo and Facebook accounts and chat with Facebook contacts directly within Yahoo email inbox. There is no need to open Facebook or any other dedicated IM client for Facebook

Another advantage of using Yahoo mail for chatting with Facebook friends is when your company has blocked Facebook access at office and you’re unable to Login to Facebook for whatever reasons. If your sole purpose is to chat with Facebook friends without opening Facebook.com, connecting your Yahoo account with Facebook seems like a decent and working workaround.

Chat With Facebook Friends From Yahoo Email Inbox

1. First, you will need to connect your Facebook and Yahoo accounts and import your Facebook contact list to your Yahoo contact list. There are two ways to do this

– Login to your Facebook account and download the contact information and email addresses of Facebook friends.

– Go to your Yahoo contact list and auto import all Facebook contacts directly into the yahoo mail account. As this is the most logical and simpler option, I will show you the steps using the second method.

2. Login to your Yahoo mail account, switch to the “Contacts” tab and click the Facebook icon

3. In the next step, login to your Facebook account and grant all the necessary permissions to Yahoo. This is an important step because if you don’t provide all the necessary permissions, you won’t be able to see the option to chat with Facebook friends on your Yahoo mail inbox.

4. When Yahoo has successfully copied all your friends contact information from Facebook, switch to your Yahoo email inbox and you should see an option to chat with Facebook buddies on the left sidebar.

It is important to note that you have to click the small “Sign in” button on top of the Yahoo web messenger to activate it and see which of your Facebook friends are online at the moment.

Update: Quite recently, Facebook updated their messaging system to support offline chat feature. Sadly, Yahoo IM chat does not support this feature yet. What this means is that you can only send messages to those Facebook friends who are online at the moment. if you want to send offline messages to a particular Facebook friend, you have to use Facebook chat instead.

Chat With Facebook Friends From Yahoo Messenger (Desktop)

The procedure is exactly similar for Yahoo’s desktop messenger. Here are the step by step instructions:

1. Launch Yahoo messenger desktop client and click the button that says “Link to Facebook”. I am running the latest version of Yahoo messenger and the link appears on the main window after signing in.

2. This will open a small window where you need to sign in with your Facebook account credentials. Once you are through and have granted all the permissions to Yahoo messenger desktop client, you should see your entire Facebook friend list on Yahoo messenger desktop client.

Do you use Yahoo messenger to chat with Facebook friends? Do you prefer using the desktop client or using the yahoo mail version? Tell us in the comments section.