Yahoo has added a social networking feature to its Answers service, allowing you to add Yahoo Answers users to your own personal collection of contacts, providing direct access to the questions they ask, answer, and star on Answers. “This allows you to identify individuals on Answers whose knowledge you value and make them part of your friend list,” said Tomi Poutanen, Yahoo’s director of product management for social search.

Answers Network is similar to other social networking services offered by Yahoo, including Flickr contacts, the Del.icio.us network and MyBlogLogs contact lists. Adding a contact is simple—simply click on a Yahoo Answers user avatar, and then from their profile page, click “Add to my contacts.”

Unfortunately, although similar to other Yahoo networks, there’s no way to combine or add your contacts from Flickr, for example, to Yahoo Answers Network. Poutanen says that’s deliberate. “Just because somebody provides really good photos, they may not also contribute good knowledge,” he said, adding that Yahoo does plan to provide tools to integrate their various networking services in the future.

The Yahoo Answers team has posted more information about Answers Network on the Yahoo 360 blog.

Related Topics: Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Yahoo: Answers

About The Author: Chris Sherman (@CJSherman) is Executive Editor of SearchEngineLand.com and President of Searchwise LLC, a Boulder Colorado based Web consulting firm. He also programs and co-chairs the Search Marketing Expo - SMX conference series. See more articles by Chris Sherman