Busy buying last minute gifts or just trying to squeeze in some well-deserved rest and relaxation this year-end? Not to worry, we’ve packed a short and sweet round up so you can get on your merry way. Happy holidays fellow yodelers and see you in 2008!

• Avoiding holiday traffic: Now you can skip the congestion on the main freeway or take the scenic route for your holiday travels on Yahoo! Maps. When you get your list of directions and see that it takes you on a freeway or road you aren’t familiar with or want to avoid, just drag and drop the route to your preferred route on the map and it will instantly readjust itself. You’ll also see the difference in distance and time of your preferred route against Yahoo! Maps’ fastest route to gauge what makes the most sense. Talk about the road less traveled! Read more here.
• Faster, better, fresher dater: All you have to do is sign in to Yahoo! Personals to experience the brand new look and feel of the refreshed homepage. Get easier access to more search results and saved profiles (bigger profile pics don’t hurt) via a new carousel feature, flirt like never before with quick access to your mail, and know exactly who is checking you out with the “Who’s Viewed Me” feature. No more dilly-dallying folks, go forth and find your match!
• Remixing holiday cards: Want to know what you get when you jumble Yahoo!’s yodel, Master P and Romeo, and a drag and drop feature? You get a musical, remixable, and customizable holiday e-card. Think you can throwdown the best mix? Take a looksee and create your own to send to friends and family this holiday season.

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

About 14,000 people around the world are heading out for the holidays tonight sporting fuzzy black fleece jackets, courtesy of our generous founders. As they have for the past 11 years, Jerry Yang and David Filo have generously bestowed holiday gifts on all good little Yahoos.

Past gifts have included free coffee for all (a tradition I cash in on every morning), a purple sleeping bag (presumably to get more work out of us), a purple gym bag (to offset all that work), an MP3 player (I think it fit 20 songs, but it was so newfangled back in 2001), a Yahoo!opoly game (a clever adaptation of the Milton Bradley favorite, complete with awesomely relevant metal game pieces), more jackets (they’re clearly a crowd-pleaser), and a $100 charity gift certificate (a favorite for many).

Over the last week, Jerry and David (and their many elves) personally helped employees zip up into their new duds. We threw together this little video of the handout process to get everyone into the holiday spirit. And notice the intrigue surrounding the “bonus” gift that came along with the jackets.

We’ll be home watching our video yule log next week, as I’m sure will you, so let me take this opportunity to thank all of our readers for continuing to read, comment, and repeat. Here’s to a yodelful 2008!

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Our second data center in Central Washington is open for business! Earlier this month we hosted more than 250 local community members and officials, contractors, and construction crew in Quincy, Washington to celebrate the opening of our first data center built from the ground up. We take great care to find the right combination of fiber connectivity, network availability, low cost of power, land and operations, and a skilled workforce to operate a state-of-the-art facility when looking for new data center locations. In Quincy and nearby Wenatchee (where we opened a data center last November), we not only found all the right resources, we were also embraced by a welcoming community.

Whether you’re checking your email or sending one, our data centers are making that action possible behind the scenes. These data centers support all our servers and network connectivity, which means access for you to all our products around the world. Greening our data centers has also been core to the company’s overall carbon neutral efforts this year and innovations in the design and operations of our new data centers help us meet our promise to be an environmentally responsible business.

The coolest part (no pun intended!) of the new Quincy facility is that it takes advantage of a cooling technology that saves energy costs every year and is sourced by 99% renewable power. A substantial amount of energy is used to cool Yahoo!’s server infrastructure. Typical data centers use air conditioning year-round, but Yahoo! is exploring technologies that include high-efficiency air-conditioning systems that use water-based chillers combined with using cold external air to cool the inside of the data center about ¾ of the year (we’re pushing for more). Our goal is to operate our Washington facilities with a 100% zero-carbon footprint by using renewable hydroelectric energy, investing in additional carbon-offsets, and producing zero water waste through chemical-free water treatment and water recycling.

We’re proud of the continued infrastructure improvements we’re making to increase our control of operations and energy-efficiency, and we’re just getting started with the Quincy facility. More than 330,000 man-hours have gone into completing the project, and we couldn’t have done it without the community’s support and the incredible commitment from the building and construction crews – hopefully the beginning of a long relationship with many more celebrations to come. When addressing the crowd at Quincy’s grand opening, our Co-Founder David Filo and Vice President of Operations Kevin Timmons reiterated the long-term investment that these data centers represent for Yahoo! and the opportunity to further support our growing community of users, like you. So the next time you send an email or do a Yahoo! search, you can rest assured that our data centers are working fast and furiously (juked up on renewable energy) to make your Yahoo! experience a seamless one.

KC Mares
Director of Data Center Strategy

Did you know that when Oprah Winfrey joined Barack Obama on the campaign trail last week, his Yahoo! Buzz rating (based on the volume of people who searched for variations of his name) shot up by more than 40 percent? Or that a much wider margin of voters are literally putting their money on Giuliani as the Republican candidate than are supporting him in the polls?

That’s the kind of insight we thought Yahoo! users would find interesting when evaluating this year’s election. It’s why we launched the “political dashboard,” a site that offers some interesting trends of the moment, as well as a state-by-state and candidate-by-candidate data analysis to give even the most hardcore political junkies their campaign fix.

It’s a part of our Election 2008 news site, and gives you a comparative snapshot of the most important campaign data, ranging from aggregate poll data, fundraising information, and even “prediction market” statistics from Intrade (an Irish-based website that uses a stock market-like approach to let users predict the election’s outcome). The dashboard gives a national overview, as well as a state-by-state analysis of both who’s winning and who’s voting. And it’s all updated daily. This type of analysis allows you to track for yourself who’s rising (or falling) as the polls, and ultimately the votes, come in. For now, it’s focused on the presidential candidates, but we also plan to add in local election data as those races heat up in the states.

Of course, we’ve also included the Yahoo! Buzz metrics, which may be the most interesting data point in our minds. This is the first time search data has been presented alongside traditional campaign metrics — something no other major news site can offer.

Check it out for yourself, and let us know what you think.

Alan Warms
General Manager, Yahoo! News

Smell something fishy? People around the world are celebrating National Bouillabaisse Day with a bowl of the popular Mediterranean fish soup. After you’ve tried to pronounce it, check out what we’ve stewed up this week.

• It’s a Picnik: Get rid of that dreaded red eye or crop out your ex with a click of the newly integrated Picnik photo editing tools on Flickr. Just select “edit photo” located above your Flickr photo to instantly do things like resize, sharpen, or just “auto-fix” to get a more brilliant photo — without ever leaving Flickr. Whatcha waiting for? Be a Flickr Picniker and see some before and after examples.
• Entertainment central: Want to know what movies to skip this weekend? Curious which hip hop album to buy for your friend? Or just need the latest 411 on Britney? Find all your Hollywood news at our new Yahoo! Entertainment page, including games, celebrity news and photos, TV listings, and Upcoming local events — all in one place! We’ve even added a new blog module with posts from RogerEbert, TV Guide and E! Online, and a shiny new “Top 10” section that gives you the quick fix of hottest box office movies, songs, and searches. The best part is that you can move modules up or down so your interests stay above the fold. That’s right, Paris, I’d rather play Sudoku.

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

We may have thousands of talented developers under our roof, but nothing beats the scale of the open source community — where programmers around the world volunteer their expertise to collaborate virtually in the name of tackling some of today’s toughest computing challenges.

That’s why we’re becoming a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, the non-profit that provides support for open source projects like the Apache HTTP server (which powers much of the Yahoo! network and has for more than 10 years), Lucene (the search software widely used on the Web), and Hadoop (which lets developers easily write and run applications that process massive amounts of data). All of these are community-driven efforts that will help define the future of web services.

We’re a big believer in giving back to this community After all, it could be the source of the next big breakthrough. You may recall that we recently unleashed a supercomputer, which researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are using as their distributed computing playground. We also have several engineers actively contributing to Apache’s Hadoop. In fact, we’re the project’s largest contributor and were so impressed with its potential, that we hired its founder, Doug Cutting, who’s also a VP at Apache.

We’ve been a huge open source beneficiary and hope our support of Apache will continue to improve the quality and expand the usage of critical software that will propel the entire industry.

Jay Kistler
VP, Systems, Tools and Services
Search & Advertising Technology Group

Unless I’m terribly rushed to post something, I usually take a few minutes to make my blog posts more reader friendly — or at least visually appealing. That means going through the post and linking names of people and companies to their respective web sites (or Wikipedia pages), adding an image or two, and so on. I appreciate it when authors I read take the effort to do this in their writing, so I try to do the same. But to be honest, it’s kind of tedious. And being the lazy person I am, that means I often don’t bother.

That’s why the just released Yahoo! Shortcuts WordPress Plug-In caught my interest when I first got a look at it. Instead of putting the burden on me, it operates as an assistant in the background, looking for relevant links, images, and other shortcuts. Then, when you’re done writing, you can simply look through what it found and select what you’d like to keep.

But words really don’t quite capture what’s going on. Check out this video demo and sceencast that we shot with Alex King (of CrowdFavorite, which created the plug-in) at the Defrag Conference in Denver last month.

As you see, the plug-in can grab Flickr photos, Maps (like of Zanzibar, where I’m getting married), Finance charts, as well as recognizing and suggesting links to popular products, autos, news personalities, and more.

With my Yahoo Developer Network hat on, I love seeing good tools that use our web service APIs to make life a little bit easier. Ariel Seidman has more on the plug-in over at the Yahoo! Search blog. If you’re a WordPress blogger looking for tool to make life easier, check it out.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

If you thought surfing live TV with a seatbelt securely fastened about your waist was cool, try popping off an instant message, SMS or email at 30,000 feet! Yahoo! is partnering with JetBlue, RIM, and LiveTV (the JetBlue subsidiary that makes that seatback entertainment possible) to take our global email and IM leadership (and our promise to keep friends and family connected) to new heights – literally.

You might have heard the news by now, but as we speak, JetBlue Flight 641 is flying from NYC’s Kennedy Airport en route to San Francisco, equipped with an onboard wireless network that lets passengers use Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger in flight for free. Known as BetaBlue, the Airbus A320 is the first domestic plane to offer such a service. And it’s a six-month test we hope will expand.

For the last couple of months the Yahoo! Mail and Messenger teams have been working hard to develop custom, lightweight versions that perform particularly well with the bandwidth considerations of a high-altitude network. If you have a WiFi-enabled laptop, you can log on and find all of the basic email and messenger functionality. You can also check your Address Book, send text messages, and connect with your Yahoo! contacts as well as those using Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger. You can even have your Messenger status link to a map that lets friends on the ground track exactly where your flight is at that moment!

The other big news, especially for Crackberry addicts like me, is that, on BetaBlue, you’ll be able to check Yahoo! Mail and Messenger on your WiFi-enabled BlackBerry (the 8820 and Curve 8320) — though you still need to turn off the cellular transmitter.

How does it work? The service uses an FCC-licensed air-to-ground spectrum owned by LiveTV. It provides coverage in the continental U.S. above 10,000 feet and connects with 100 air-to-ground communications towers.

Last week I had the chance to take BetaBlue for a spin to preview our project with JetBlue founder Dave Neeleman, LiveTV CEO Nate Quigley, folks from RIM, and a handful of media. We headed off from JFK, got up to cruising altitude, and fired off some messages. As this is still a beta service, we are excited to work with our partners to make this an ideal consumer experience and look forward to hearing what BetaBlue customers have to say.

Unfortunately you can’t request to book passage on BetaBlue — it’s luck of the draw. But if you arrive at your gate and see our logo emblazoned on your plane, you’ll know you’re in for an entertaining ride.

Brad Garlinghouse
SVP, Yahoo! Communications & Communities

If there was any doubt that the Earth was round, the famous Blue Marble photograph definitely put it to rest 35 years ago. After you’ve checked out the photo for yourself, read on for our earthly updates.

• Vista from the ground up: It’s just a pre-beta version now, but Yahoo! Messenger just got its full Vista-cred from the bottom up with new features like drag and drop tabs for your conversations, emoticons with a little extra oomph, options to change skin color for every IM window (for the color-conscious) , and sending files (fun photos or work documents) larger than 2G to friends and coworkers. That’s just the start, there’s much more we’re planning and testing, so try it out and tell us what you think. And stay tuned for the next release here.
• Take us on your trip: We’ve launched a new “My Travel” experience on Yahoo! Travel so you can keep track of all your trip plans, user reviews, photos and recent searches. You can also use this anthology to share your travel interests with other Yahoo! Travel users. There’s even an interactive map that can be personalized with all the places you’ve been to and places you want to go. The best part? The Yahoo! FareChase will automatically monitor and pull up price drops for flights to your dream locations. Talk about reminding yourself to take a vacation! Start your profile page now so you can take us with you on your next journey!

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

Black Friday, Cyber Monday….how about a day or even a week that celebrates the giving-back part of the holidays? Two years ago, we launched the idea of Cyber Giving Week, dedicated to generous giving and raising money for local and national charities throughout the last week of December (of course, the tax reduction doesn’t hurt). Since our inaugural year, we’ve helped to raise millions of dollars for hundreds of charitable organizations. A feat only possible because of your generous helpings of goodwill.

With that in mind, we’ved kicked off our Cyber Giving Week program a little early this year to put a spotlight on you. We want to hear your inspirational stories of giving and to share them with our global community. Today we launched our “Be a Better Inspiration” campaign on Bix, so you can tell us about individuals making extraordinary differences through their charity work in your local community.

The cool Bix platform lets you upload audio so that the story can really come to life (I promise it’s easy — even I could do it). Just make sure to submit your story and vote for your favorite by December 19. On December 25, we’ll announce the top five finalists on a microsite that will allow you (and our community) to really make a difference — by voting with your wallets. The finalist associated with the charity that receives the most number of unique donors will receive a matching grant from Yahoo! of up to $50,000.

For the third year in a row, we’ve teamed up with Network for Good to make it easy for you to donate and see in real-time which charity has the highest count. As you make plans to spend your holidays with friends and family, share with them how you’re giving back this season (think Facebook, MySpace, or your personal blog) or make this the year you offer gifts of donations on their behalf. It turns out that the number one reason why someone donates to a charity is because a trusted friend or family member has asked them. What are you waiting for?

Tell us your inspirational story, vote for your favorite local hero, and encourage your friends and family to join your good cause! Tis’ the season for some pulling of the heart strings!

Meg Garlinghouse
Yahoo! for Good