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.