I just posted this on our Yahoo! Store blog, but wanted to follow up here as well.

We’ve heard you and we’ve been hearing from our merchant partners since Monday, and I want to let you know what happened earlier this week and what we’re doing about it.

On Monday and for a very short time yesterday, unusual service interruptions affected transactions in Yahoo! Merchant Solutions/Yahoo! Stores. After an investigation, we learned that the specific servers affected were the Shopping Cart database servers that handle cart contents for each shopper. New servers were added to the Shopping Cart database during our pre-holiday planning to manage the projected increase in transaction volume. When the holiday traffic surged, the hardware and software settings caused these servers to experience delays when customers added items to the Shopping Cart to complete checkout. When delays exceeded time limits, customers saw error messages stating that the servers had timed out (were not responding).

On Thursday, the service interruption occurred between 10:13 a.m. and 10:25 a.m. PT. During this time, merchants’ sites could not be accessed by shoppers. After investigating the issue, we found that this interruption occurred due to a network configuration issue resulting from new server capacity that was added for the holiday shopping season.

Immediately upon identification of both of these issues, our team worked hard to improve the situation as quickly as possible, and systems are now performing as expected.

These service interruptions were unrelated to our October feature release.

We fixed the problems as quickly as possible, and we are continuing to make improvements to our systems, including the addition of new hardware and system maintenance conducted on November 28. We will continue to post information about ongoing activities at our system status page.

We have apologized to our merchant partners for the impact that this service interruption had on their business and their customers at this busy time of year. As a token of our commitment to them, we have communicated with them our intent to waive all sales transaction fees for the month of November.

The success of our merchants’ business is extremely important to us, and we are committed to work as hard as we can, over and above the efforts already underway, to avoid such issues in the future.

Rich Riley
SVP, Online Channel Division

With the Big Game coming up, there’s another big game brewing: Stanford and Cal are neck and neck for the $25,000 Kickstart Alumni Challenge, with USC at their heels. Michigan made a huge leap in the rankings this week, and is now just one point behind UT Austin. The action isn’t just with the big schools, though — Tulane and Carnegie Mellon are also serious contenders for the prize.

These schools, among all US colleges and universities, are competing through December 31st for this trophy: a $25K donation awarded to the school with the most alums on Kickstart, Yahoo!’s new product that connects college students and recent grads with alumni. The purpose of Kickstart is to help students and alums find each other for career help, whether it’s for internships and jobs or advice.

We kicked off less than a month ago, and we’ve been overwhelmed with the enthusiastic feedback we’ve received. Many users wanted to spread the word to their friends and coworkers; we’re putting the final touches on an invite feature that will be out shortly. Many users added international schools and companies; not only did we increase support for these locales, we also overhauled our search so it’s easier for users to find organizations and people as the numbers increase. Most notably, we’re seeing a lot of support from alumni communities who have been lacking a solution to connect with fellow alums, including new grads.

So help your school win the prize! It doesn’t matter if your school is big or small; what matters is which one has alumni who step up and represent. Sign up on Kickstart and spread the word to your fellow alums to show their school pride.

While the $25,000 prize is a great way to show support for your school, you’ll also be helping current students see what is possible after graduation. Your profile could be that special flag that turns the game around on a future grad’s career. And who knows, maybe another alum on the site will reach out and offer a whole new play on your own career. The best way to maximize all these chances is to put your best foot forward in your profile and get out there.

Good luck!

Cynthia Johanson, Dan Wascovich and the Kickstart Team

By now you have probably heard about the problems that many of our small business merchant customers experienced yesterday. Unfortunately, the system outage occurred at one of the worst possible times, and despite our concerted efforts to fix the problem as it emerged on Monday, we know that we let our merchant partners and their customers down. The good news is that our systems are now operating normally, and our merchants are able to accept orders from their customers.

Here’s what happened:

• On Monday at 6:00AM PT, the systems that power our merchant stores experienced outages, and shoppers of those stores were met with either error messages or they were unable to complete the checkout process.
• These issues lasted until about 1:00PM PT when, despite slow performance, transactions began going through at a much higher rate.
• By 6:00 PM PT things were back to normal and the performance of our systems was at 100%.

We deeply regret the inconvenience this caused to both our merchants and their shoppers. Our customers’ expectations were not met, nor were our own. And we are moving mountains inside Yahoo! to find out why and how this happened, and to take steps to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

As for the future, rest assured that we are taking the necessary steps to prepare for the peak holiday selling season. We have technical and customer relations staff mobilized and ready to support our partners.

At Yahoo! Small Business, we know that our success and our customers’ success are interdependent, and yesterday’s issue reminds us that we need to continue to work even harder in the future.

Rich Riley
SVP, Online Channel Division, Yahoo!

Don’t break my heart, my achy breaky heart. Oops, wrong Cyrus. Happy 15th birthday, Miley. After you’ve done a little song and dance (Hannah Montana-style), check out the updates we’ve tuned up.

• People, places, photos: We’ve mentioned Flickr’s vision to be “the eyes of the world” before. Now you can view that world through photos like never before. Our new “Places” page is now live, letting you browse photos by location. How do you contribute your photos? When you upload your photos to Flickr, add your photos to a map using Organizr (open the Map tab to find the place you took the photo and then drag/drop your photo). The more photos you stick on the map, the more interesting and fresher photos you’ll see. We’re also playing around with a new experimental map that displays breaking news through photos (think weddings, the latest geek fest, or something paparazzi-worthy).
• Taking back your inbox: We’ve overhauled the Yahoo! Mail Security site with new tips and tricks to help you protect your inbox from malicious phishers, get the latest digital vaccine against bad attachments, and clean the clutter of pesky spam. Happy intruder-free emailing!
• Outta beta: The new Yahoo! Music has ditched its beta stature. New editorial sections include a tally of our best picks of videos, music, photos and lyrics, and Music Blogs, where you’ll hear from both our in-house and industry bloggers. We’ve also juked up the backend technology to bring you the music you want on the homepage with videos, songs, albums and artists, all personalized just for you. Ditto that for the new music video page. And a new upcoming concerts module that’s hip to your local hood to help take your music offline. There’s so much more — read all about it on the team’s blog.
• Gobble, gobble: Whether you’re still working off your tryptophan-induced food coma or breaking out the holiday decorations, deck your My Yahoo! with a Thanksgiving or winter-y theme. Talk about getting into the holiday spirit!

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

Ever want to go bowling with the President? And if so, which of the current crop of candidates would you want as your bowling partner? Perhaps more importantly, who wouldn’t you want on your bowling team? You can find how Americans answered those questions and more in the first installment of Yahoo! News’ “Political Pulse” Poll. It’s our effort — in partnership with the Associated Press — to break down this election beyond the head-to-head numbers and take a deeper look at what’s actually driving Americans to make their choices for president. What do Americans really care about? Is it the candidate’s looks, policy positions, or some combination?

Over the next 12 months, Yahoo! News will offer eight political polls that examine these questions. We hope to give you a sense for how Americans are feeling about issues like religion, the environment, and even which candidates are considered the best looking? (Clinton, Edwards, and Obama all get the thumbs-up from Democrats. Republicans don’t find the GOP candidates quite so attractive.)

The questions will remain mostly the same for all eight polls and will survey the same 2,000 Americans throughout the campaign stretch so we can see firsthand how their beliefs develop or change. How much will candidates’ “likability” play into who actually gets your final vote? Will the next poll show Republicans know more about Fred Thompson than his role on Law and Order? Stay tuned. The next one is scheduled to drop in early ‘08.

If you’re a political junkie or just like taking polls, input your votes on our interactive poll to see how your views compare to the rest of America.

Ezra Palmer
Managing Editor, Yahoo! News

The recently launched YDN Theater, from the good folks at Yahoo! Developer Network, takes it to 11 today. They caught up with Maria Sansone, the inimitable host of The9, who walks us through the winning hacks from last month’s Hack Day Bangalore:

It’s revenge of the nerds at its finest.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Wanna feel old? Luke and Laura got married 26 years ago today in what remains the highest-rated hour in daytime TV history. Glad Luke’s perm is history, too. Now go check out this week’s dramatic updates.

• Searching for your plus-one: Have you tried online? Yahoo! Personals has gotten a winter makeover so you can find that someone special in time for your New Year’s kiss. We’ve updated the page with a simple view of potential dates through profile cards and enhanced searching and matching features like “We Match” and “I Match” that pair up the most suitable profiles. We even added a two-column profile display that allows you to organize profiles, send email, and icebreakers all from the search results page. Go on, be a multi-tasking dater!
• Let the shopping begin: Cutting through the clutter of gift options just got easier with some new holiday shopping features on Yahoo!. Check out the new Green Holiday Gift Guide on Yahoo! Green. It offers expert-recommended Earth-friendly ideas for your eco-diva sister, gadget geek father, or green grandparent. Over on Yahoo! Shopping, a new social shopping feature lets you swap and share coupon deals and experiences with other shoppers. And don’t miss the new product category browse pages that integrate buying guides, reviews and ratings, price comparisons, and Yahoo! Answers all in one place to help you find that thoughtful gift.
• IM plus MY: Now you can IM your pals while you’re checking out your My Yahoo! page. Noticed that there will be back-to-back reruns of “Grey’s Anatomy” according to your TV listings module? Invite the gang over via Yahoo! Messenger for a marathon run of McDreamy and Chinese take out — all from your My Yahoo! page. It’s a lightweight version of Yahoo! Messenger, so you may not see all the bells and whistles you’re used to. But you can drag and drop the module wherever you want so you can keep everything you need above the fold! Add the module here.

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

I’d like to invite you to Next, a new Yahoo! blog focused on technology and the people who build it. You’ll meet tech innovators from all corners of Yahoo! — flash wizards, data visualizers, intra- and entrepreneurs, inventors, pundits, and mashup-makers. We’ll show winning hacks from our globe-spanning Hack Days (like MapMixer) and stuff from Brickhouse, where code sprints turn hacks into platforms and grassroots ideas take shape.

We’ll roll out new work from the Advanced Products team like the recently launched Kickstart, a professional network that connects college students with alumni and peers to kickstart their careers. We’ll introduce the work of scientists and researchers from our Berkeley-based Advanced Research group, like Zync, which began with some ideas about using community to understand content, and is now built into Yahoo! Messenger to let you sync and share online videos with a friend. On Next, we’ll serve up tasty previews and edgy ideas — early access to alpha and beta releases, widgets, doodads, and prototypes — stuff you can play with or ponder.

Brickhouse is a fifth-floor loft in San Francisco that’s a workplace for several teams and meeting space for Lunch 2.0 gatherings, casual talks with scientists and Web philosophers, Wii Wednesdays, and design installations. It’s one of many nodes where the future of Yahoo! is being imagined and engineered. On next.yahoo.com we’ll take a look at that future as it unfolds, from Brickhouse to Bangalore, Sunnyvale to Singapore to Sao Paolo, across the Yahoo! network and beyond.

The web is interactive, two-way, conversational, always changing. You know that. The next shiny new Flickr, Delicious , Upcoming, Twitter, Digg, or Facebook will emerge where a community of people discover something they love, and stick around to shape what’s growing there and show us where the value is.

I envision Next as a public forum where many voices contribute to a conversation about technology trends, disruptive innovation, the power of network effects and participatory media, the transformation and opening of corporate culture, all the surprising goodness that will define the next internet frontiers.

That’s what’s next. Hope to see you there.

Bradley Horowitz
VP, Advanced Development

* In some computer interfaces, the asterisk is the wildcard character and stands for any string of characters. This is also known as a wildcard symbol.

What motivates people to give? It’s something that we at the Yahoo! Employee Foundation (YEF) think about a lot. YEF was started in 1999 by our founders, Jerry and David, along with a few other motivated Yahoos who wanted to create a unique program designed to help Yahoos give back to their communities. They hatched a grassroots organization that has since contributed nearly $6 million to more than 250 non-profits in our surrounding communities, donated 2,500 holiday gifts to low-income children, held countless volunteer events, and has chapters in every U.S. office.

The most special and unique thing about YEF is that it’s 100% employee driven on an all-volunteer basis. All of the money is donated by Yahoo! employees (many allocate a portion of their paychecks), all grant recipients are championed by Yahoo! employees, and all YEF activities are run by a volunteer committee of Yahoo! employees. The coolest aspect of the foundation is that it can turn a modest contribution into a windfall for a favorite non-profit. A donation of at just $50 can turn into a grant of up to $40,000 for a charity you support. You do the math — that’s a good investment! The foundation focuses grants on the areas of Youth & Education, Family & Community Building, and Environment — causes that come directly from an annual employee survey to be sure we are properly aligned with what Yahoos feel is important. (Note that YEF doesn’t accept unsolicited requests, but you’re more than welcome to sidle up next to a committed Yahoo for grant championing.)

Every fall, we try to remind Yahoos about the power of YEF and increase our enrollment. This year we used a two-pronged approach. First, Jerry and David baited us with a $1 million donation if we were able to meet 25% participation among U.S. employees. Then many of our leaders upped the ante by promising to subject themselves to public humiliation, which turned out to be just as much (if not more!) of a motivation.

It did the trick. We beat our goal and raised a lot of money that will be given in future grant cycles. And now it’s time for Yahoos to cash in on the degradation of their leaders. Executives from our Search, Listings and Search Marketing groups have donned fantastic Mod Squad-era wigs and fed breakfast to an army of Yahoos in our Burbank office. Engineering leaders threw a beer and pizza party and volunteered to get submersed in a dunk tank — in jeans and sneakers, no less. (Nothing quite beats giving your manager a good soaking.) Up next, still more executives will host karaoke parties, invitation-only group dinners, hairnet-shielded pancake breakfasts, and raffles for choice parking spots (the only reserved parking at Yahoo! is won at our annual year-end auction, benefiting YEF… and it’s quite a sacrifice to give that up!).

I’m proud to say that the Yahoo! Employee Foundation is one of those things that distinguishes the experience here. It’s a collective effort showing that many of us Yahoos share a common gene. One that compels us to give back and make a difference.

Ben Baker
President, Yahoo! Employee Foundation Board
Director, Customer Care

Photos from Jeremy Johnstone

… for our new open academic research partnership

Today we’ve made a major announcement that gives us a lot to be proud of and a lot to be excited about. As the Yahoo! Academic Relations team traveled around to the many great universities we’ve been working with, one of the most frequent desires we’ve heard is the wish for access by faculty and students to the kind of Internet-scale computing environment that is our bread and butter, but which is almost impossible to find on a university campus.

Well, after several months of hard work and a huge “OneYahoo!” effort by multiple teams, we’ve been able to deliver exactly that. M45, as it’s called, is a 4,000-processor cluster supercomputer that runs Hadoop and other open-source distributed computing software. To put it in context, it’s one of the fifty most powerful computers in the world. Today we begin our journey to make it available to the academic research community.

To get the ball rolling, we’ve engaged in a significant partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, which will be the first to benefit from our cluster and our large-scale distributed systems expertise, complementing their own incredible expertise in the theory and practice of distributed computing. This a major first step for us on the road to facilitating a worldwide open-source software research program in real-world large-scale supercomputing environments. This is a first-of-its-kind effort in the industry. Instead of merely giving academics computers to run software applications for coursework, we will enable researchers to change the systems software that sits between the application and the hardware. By making the system open for experimentation and research at all levels, we will be helping the worldwide research community get to the next level in its understanding of large-scale computing systems.

As you may know, Yahoo! has been a leader in the open-source community with our contributions to Hadoop and now the incubation of the Pig parallel programming environment within the Apache Software Foundation. Given our interest in open collaboration, we can all engage in research on a common software base.

Given the growing popularity of Hadoop, Yahoo! and Carnegie Mellon also plan to co-host a Hadoop Summit in the first half 2008, inviting major Hadoop users to participate in this open, collaborative community. Major companies such as Facebook and leading research universities such as the University of California, Berkeley, are heavy users of Hadoop. We would certainly like to invite them and others to participate in this open community.

We called our cluster “M45” after one of the best known open star clusters (the Pleiades). It’s up and running Hadoop jobs, and with its 3 terabytes of memory and 1.5 petabytes of disk, we hope it will provide a major boost to the worldwide university research community. We love being out there in front and supporting the open-source community, and we are eager to reach for the stars with Carnegie Mellon, and soon, the entire academic computing research community.

I want to offer my personal thanks and congratulations to the many Yahoos from our Engineering, Site Operations, Research, Legal, PR, and Academic Relations teams for incredible work in getting this going.

Ron Brachman
VP, Worldwide Research Operations, Yahoo! Research
Head, Yahoo! Academic Relations