A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

– Yahoo!’s acquisition of Citizen Sports has led new Facebook-connected social functionality (sponsored by Miller Lite) for its fantasy football teams this year. Anyone with a team on Yahoo! Sports will be able to “like” that team and get player updates and other content delivered straight to his or her Facebook news stream.

– The promotional plan for NFL.com’s new fantasy football league-management product has moved from Phase 1 — targeting existing league managers — to Phase 2, which will focus more on drawing in new players. NFL.com will also reportedly start a fantasy football show on the Web in September. (Why NFL Network doesn’t have a dedicated fantasy show yet for the predominant field of American players is a mystery to us.)

– It can be interesting enough to see where Maurice Jones-Drew will go in Round 1 of the typical 2010 fantasy football draft, but Jones-Drew himself helped add interest to the Sirius XM Times Square draft on Wednesday. The Jaguars running back worked a trade with fellow host Jay Thomas to acquire himself, after Thomas drafted MJD third overall. Here are (most of) the rest of the results.

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I’m not the slightest bit an expert on acquisitions. However, I have to think a key factor in many cases must be the ability of the smaller company to bring with it an established good or service that the larger firm would’ve otherwise had to build from scratch.

That, of course, was the primary motivation for this week’s announced deal that saw Yahoo! buy Citizen Sports.

“When we really sat down and looked at what we were doing in the social space and where we were trying to get, we ultimately decided that what they already had is superior than what we would have been able to do in the short term,” Yahoo! media vice president James Pitaro said in this article from PaidContent.org. “We haven’t been as active on Facebook as we should be. It’s a top priority for our media businesses.”

Aside from seeking to enhance its social-network presence simply because of the massive audience involved, Pitaro said Yahoo! sees Facebook and similar sites as competitors for fantasy players. That doesn’t refer to the fantasy applications hitting social networks these days, but rather the limited leisure time that is so often spent on such pages.

Reaching that audience is important for bringing in new players who might not otherwise come to Yahoo! fantasy games on their own.

The other key area of this deal is smart-phone apps. Yahoo! has put out its own iPhone products for fantasy football and fantasy baseball, efforts that will reportedly be combined with Citizen’s offerings going forward. The acquisition, however, brings the multisport application Sportacular under the Yahoo! umbrella.

“It’s fantastic,” Pitaro was quoted as saying, speaking of a concept that Yahoo! had discussed pursuing. “We don’t have to go out and build this thing.”

On the other side, the Paid Content report says that Citizen was not looking to sell but realized that it had “created shareholder value.” The article also says all 30 of Citizen’s employees will join Yahoo! once the deal is finalized.

As expected, Yahoo! announced Wednesday that it had signed an agreement to buy San Francisco-based Citizen Sports.

“Sports has been among the earliest online categories to experience rapid social proliferation, and the combination of Citizen Sports’ leading products with our world-class sports experience on Yahoo! Sports is a win-win for sports fans globally,” senior VP Bryan Lamkin of Yahoo!’s Consumer Products Group said in the official release.

Mike Kerns, co-founder and CEO of Citizen Sports added: “Citizen Sports was founded with the intent to enable fans to access news, scores and fantasy games on the platform of their choice. We look forward to becoming a part of Yahoo! and bringing our social experiences to their 600 million users around the globe.”

As FSB.com mentioned in the previous report, Citizen came to market as ProTrade back in 2004. The company moved away from its central stock-trading game (now closed) in the past several years to focus on developing applications for social networks and smart phones. That effort included the November 2008 acquisitions of competing companies Sport Interactiva, FantasyBook and Sportacular.

The Yahoo! release says that Citizen brings applications for social networks Facebook, MySpace and hi5, and for the iPhone and Android — applying to sports from the prep level to the pros.

Yahoo! says the deal is expected to be finalized in the second quarter of 2010.

Kara Swisher of All Things Digital is reporting that Yahoo! may be on the verge of acquiring Citizen Sports.

Specifically, she says that “according to numerous sources inside and outside the company,” Yahoo! is ready to buy “an online sports site this week.”

Per Swisher, Yahoo! and Citizen refused comment, but the report seems fairly strong and comes from a reporter with a Wall Street Journal background.

Citizen Sports, of course, first came to market as ProTrade back in 2004, led by a stock market-style sports game. Since then, Citizen has set its sites on social media. In November 2008, the company bought a trio of competitors and has since focused on Facebook and smart-phone applications, and ended ProTrade.

Swisher reports estimates of Citizen’s value from $40 million to $50 million. She also reports that Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz is the keynote speaker at this week’s IMG World Sports Congress, which means we should find out for sure soon.

FSB.com will share more as we become aware.