Finally. A chance to shed the ridicule you endured in middle school. It’s Ask a Stupid Question Day — a perfect excuse to inquire about the basement in the Alamo without fear of reprisal. Here’s what we wondered about this week:

• Messenger Number Nine: It’s official. The newest version of Yahoo! Messenger for Windows XP and Vista is out of beta. And now you can enjoy things like a total of 12 different skins, better “ignore” capabilities, inline video and picture viewing, great new emoticons (and they’re small again), ability to add contacts from other online services like Gmail and Hotmail, friend updates in your contact list, call forwarding and new voicemail delivery, the return of Yahoo! Games, and more control over your look and feel. And introducing Yahoo! Messenger Pingbox, which lets readers of your blog, website or social network page send you an IM without having to download or sign in. More here.
• (Back)check the video: What’s better than Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Hockey becoming the official fantasy game of the NHL? Being able to watch videos of killer moves on ice while you play your fantasy game. That’s right — now as you manage your rosters, player lists and line-ups, you’ll be able to watch video highlights of your favorite players on demand. A great new tool as you build your hockey dynasty. Sign up here.

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There’s been a lot of speculation swirling around about the Yahoo!-Google agreement. We hear everything from the claim that Yahoo! and Google will be fixing prices to the prediction that the agreement is a death sentence for Yahoo!’s sponsored search business. Since the critics clearly don’t understand the deal and what it means for Yahoo!, Google, advertisers, and users, it’s time for some myth-busting.

Here’s the bottom line:

• Yahoo! will use this agreement to help us become a stronger competitor in all aspects of online advertising; and
• Yahoo! is not exiting the sponsored search business. We plan to remain a strong player in sponsored search.

What is the agreement?

You may have heard that the agreement gives Google control over 90% of search advertising. That’s just plain wrong. It’s simply a contract that gives Yahoo! the right, but no obligation, to show Google AdSense ads on Yahoo!’s own network. It’s important to note that the agreement is non-exclusive and gives us the option to “backfill” with Google ads if and when we see fit. The reason we structured the deal this way – rather than a more typical exclusive deal with revenue commitments to us and traffic commitments to Google – was precisely to avoid the issues the critics are raising.

Since Yahoo! bought Overture five years ago, we’ve run that business as a closed system. For example, if you want to put a sponsored search ad on a Yahoo! search results page (“SRP”), you have to buy the ad from us. Right now, that’s the only way to access the millions of online customers who visit the Yahoo! network at the key moment when they express their interests by making a search query. Given the size of our user base and the extraordinary diversity of searches they generate, we cannot, by ourselves, provide relevant paid search ads for every search – we can’t “fill up” all of our SRPs.

In fact, no one company can fill them up – not even Google. Yes, you read that right. There are millions of unique queries, like “elevation of Mount Elbert” and many of them are never matched to a relevant sponsored search ad. These “uncovered” queries are missed opportunities for advertisers to directly engage with consumers and for consumers to benefit from relevant offers. Fortunately, Yahoo! has strong “coverage” and “depth” for many queries – meaning we have a good number of ads to display for many searches. However, coverage and depth are not equal for all categories in our marketplaces. One of our key goals is to unlock the huge value of the hundreds of thousands of less popular queries that don’t show ads Yahoo! today.

The “monetization gap” between Google and Yahoo! is in reality a value gap. Where Google is getting higher bids than Yahoo! today, this is because advertisers perceive that Google is delivering more value – more targeted leads, more clicks, and more conversions. That’s why an advertiser might be willing to bid more for a click on Google than for a click on Yahoo! – the belief that the advertiser will get more value from Google. Google is not setting prices. Advertisers determine how to value keywords. Yahoo! is committed to providing advertisers with greater value and consumers with more relevant offers and this agreement helps us meet this challenge more quickly.

Increasing advertiser value is a complicated endeavor. Part of it is technological –- for example, building better matching algorithms. Part of it is giving advertisers more control over their advertising campaigns. But we also want to increase revenue by building query share, which takes time.

In the past year, we have thought about these challenges very carefully and we created a strategy that we’re convinced is a “win win” for Yahoo! and advertisers. The core idea is limited use of Google ads to deliver more value from our SRPs and other inventory in circumstances where we aren’t delivering the best advertiser value today, and then to use resources gained by that strategy to accelerate our investments in the technologies and marketplaces of the future. That’s where the agreement comes in — it allows us to provide better, more valuable connections immediately.

Current thoughts on implementation

We will implement the agreement in a way that respects an important principle you may know as the Hippocratic Oath: “first, do no harm.” That is, we will not use Google ads in a manner that would create a significant risk to the health of our own sponsored search business.

It’s important for us to recognize when using Google ads is beneficial for users and advertisers. Queries for which we have no coverage, low depth, and/or low relative monetization are all circumstances in which backfilling probably makes sense -– they indicate that Yahoo! is not currently delivering enough value for that inventory. If Google can deliver that value where we currently don’t, then everyone wins -– including the advertiser and the consumer.

It’s equally important for us to protect the long-term health of our marketplaces. As we studied this issue, we became acutely aware that our value proposition depends on having an active, “liquid” marketplace of search terms. The good news? Yahoo! has that for the more popular and commercial queries –- the ones that produce over two-thirds of Yahoo!’s search revenues. This is often not the case, however, for less popular “tail” queries.

As we proceed, we’ll hold true to our goal of making Yahoo! a “must buy” for online advertisers. We have no intention of abandoning our key advertiser relationships. To the contrary, we are exploring ways to further strengthen those relationships, and one of the ways we will do that is through our recently announced Digital Advisory Council. We are asking industry executives from our agency and advertiser partners to join us as we explore the continued evolution of digital media and online advertising. We’re going to start by addressing the confusion and misinformation that currently exists in the market regarding Yahoo!’s agreement with Google, which is a hotly debated topic that needs some much-needed clarification.

I’ve said in the past that we’ll backfill where the monetization gap between Yahoo! and Google is the greatest. This gap is the greatest in areas in which we don’t have matches of offers with very specific queries or where our matches are narrow or not relevant. This should only enhance our relevance to consumers and bring new advertisers to our inventory that didn’t do business with us or that made only limited commitments. Our overriding principle to backfill will be those win-win opportunities to backfill our inventory with advertising that clients find valuable but to which they have had scarce access and in other ways that both optimize for user experience and the maintenance of a robust marketplace.

Finally, let me be absolutely clear that we are not in any way going to be coordinating or setting search term pricing with Google. The fact is that advertisers set prices by bidding in our real time auctions. This agreement gives advertisers a new opportunity to bid for placement on an additional network that includes Yahoo! inventory. They will bid for what they think this opportunity is worth at prices that produce positive ROI. That’s how pricing works today in this industry and this agreement won’t change that.

I hope readers of this post, as well as advertisers and regulators, can move past the false rhetoric being peddled by some of our competitors and see the marvelous potential that the agreement offers the marketplace. It’s a great opportunity for Yahoo!, and we’re committed to implementing it in a way that produces the most value for advertisers and users. Ultimately, that’s the only way we can provide value for Yahoo!’s stockholders.

Sue Decker
President

I confess, one of the little things I love about working here are the free lattes. My morning ritual of the double-nonfat-latte-in-a-medium cup is a glorious thing. But one of the by-products –- 500 disposable cups going to the trash per hour at our headquarters alone –- is not. And each year the production of these same cups generates 50,000 lbs. of carbon. We have the power to change this.

Today, we’re hosting “Chuck the Cup” Day on four of our campuses to raise awareness about the environmental impact of our coffee habit and highlight the things we can do to create a more sustainable workplace. This is the brainchild of Kai Haley, a Yahoo! Green Team member who’s been obtaining a masters in sustainable design in her spare time. Frustrated by the waste, Kai focused her thesis on an analysis of disposable cup usage and behavior patterns. She and Melissa Mangini, another impassioned Green Team member, decided to do something about it.

Earlier in the week, Green Team volunteers hid mugs throughout campus, with a note to encourage Yahoos to take and use the mugs, or bring their own to work today. Anyone who comes to one of our coffee bars with a mug goes to the head of the line (think carpool/hybrid lane — we even installed “Fast Lane” decals on the floor). We’re also giving mugs to people who correctly answer green trivia questions. And we’ve put the attention-getting sculptures that Kai created for her thesis on our main lawn, each of them representing the number of coffee cups used in 15 minutes at our headquarters (124, in case you were wondering).

In the future, all of our coffee bars will be offering Yahoo! Green Team mugs as an option (no trivia question required) so we can make this Chuck the Cup ritual a daily thing. And maybe the next time you go get your fix, you can chuck your cup, too.”

Kate Gerwe
Senior Director, Marketing
Head of Yahoo! Green Team

Don Draper of “Mad Men” would’ve loved advertising in 2009. Sure, he’d have to head out to the sidewalk with his Lucky Strikes and he wouldn’t have gotten away with philandering quite so easily, but he would’ve loved the opportunities that the digital age offers. He was a guy who knew how to connect — whether it was with a prospective client, a new hire, or a bottle of Scotch. And what we have in store for advertisers and publishers ushers the notion of “connect” into a new era.

Don, aka Jon Hamm, joined me, President Sue Decker, and our US Region Head Hilary Schneider on stage at Advertising Week in NYC today to help unveil APT from Yahoo!, our new advertising platform (which was formerly known as AMP from Yahoo! or Project Apex). Jon helped us put our platform in context with the evolution of advertising over the last 40 years – from the time when the advertiser was the indisputable king, to today, when the consumer is clearly in charge.

I started dreaming about this day 18 months ago, when I laid out my vision for our board of directors on how Yahoo! could play a unique role in changing the face of online advertising. In fact, Sue and I called it Nirvana at the time – a platform that would be to 2009 what radio was to 1924, TV to 1947, color TV to 1965, and the Internet to 1993.

Sounds like hype, right? We don’t think so. As Sue posted in April, we listened to all of the pain points that our partners shared about the process of buying and selling ads. Would you believe it takes more than 30 manual operational steps to move from ad strategy concept to launching that ad? It involves faxes (!!) and sometimes weeks in proposal processing. Audiences are now distributed across a sea of web sites and are harder to find, understand, and put a value on. Madison Avenue might think it’s a shame Johnny Walker Red doesn’t flow at the office anymore.

APT looks to change all that. It’s simple. It’s open. It’s fast (like minutes vs. days). It provides a new level of control. It offers cross-selling more easily than ever been before. It will provide large amounts of quality inventory. It will help advertisers customize and target their messages more precisely through advanced targeting. And it will drive results. All this from a single online application. No more cobbled together processes or impressions. No more wasted time.

Our confidence in APT’s ability to transform the marketplace isn’t based on theory or conjecture. It’s because of the feedback we’ve been hearing from partners who have been working with us side-by-side as we developed and then began testing the platform. In fact, William Dean Singleton, CEO of Media News Group (parent company of the San Jose Mercury News), also joined us on stage today, using words like “extraordinary and “sea-change” to describe how APT will take MNG into the future.

APT is real today and we’re starting to roll it out to our Newspaper Consortium members, which will continue for the remainder of this year and into the next. They’ll be followed by other publishers, advertisers, agencies and ad networks beginning in 2009.

If only Sterling Cooper could be here to reap the benefits.

Jerry Yang
Chief Yahoo and CEO

A bicycle is a conduit for exploration and a camera is a way to document these explorations. Our Purple Pedals Project took these two concepts and merged them into one. We call it a yBike. It was conceived to be an ambient experience in which a rider could explore their adventures and the bike would do the rest. The rest was to document these explorations and share them with the world.

Think of it as Bikes+Flickr+GPS+Camera=Whoa! This math didn’t come without its challenges. In a nutshell here is what we created. A camera mounted on the handlebars in a waterproof, swivel-enabled housing takes a picture every 60 seconds. Then, the system grabs GPS info, merges it with the picture, and uploads everything to a Yahoo! Map. The system is powered by a series of solar panels and a battery pack on the rear rack .

First, we needed a base to build the technology on, which came in the form of a custom-painted Electra Townie 8. Electra Bicycle Company embraced the project and helped us get 20 custom purple rides to Brooklyn, where software and electrical engineering was being developed.

Uncommon Projects, based in DUMBO, Brooklyn, created the software and hardware necessary to make the system come alive. In a project where the production cycle should’ve been twice as long, Uncommon worked wonders in finding a stable solution quickly. They were able to research, identify potential solutions, build prototypes and produce 20 final products in the time it normally takes to create a production roadmap.

With the technology well underway, we needed to build a housing that was effective but also fit the bikes aesthetics. For this, we looked to Quill Hyde, a designer and metal fabricator with a shop in Redhook, Brooklyn. Quill brought just the right look to the housing. It matched the bike and the technology in a way that kept everything in synch. For me, all the components of the yBike needed to be homogeneous ensuring a Cadillac ride, not a Frankenstein gallop.

With the bike, hardware, technology and housing coming together we looked to our family at Flickr to plot all these images and data on a map. This way you could know where the bike is and see what the bike sees at any given moment.

We then found 14 photographers/cyclists to jockey these purple pedals around the world. Among these riders are Amit Gumpta of Photojojo and Gina Trapani of Lifehacker, who curate their images as they explore.

Four of the bikes will be passed from rider to rider and the 20th bike is destined to be in your hands. Head over to our Start Wearing Purple site on October 1st and tell us why you deserve a yBike and you just might wake up with a special delivery on your doorstep.

Jason Anello
Ideologist, Yahoo! Buzz Marketing

Avast, me scurvy dogs. ‘Tis International Talk Like a Pirate Day — when your landlord becomes a “bilge-sucking blaggard,” your girlfriend a “buxom beauty,” tonight’s cocktail your “grog,” and that guy who won’t shut up about all of his iPhone apps a “poxy drivelswigger.” Give me an “Arrrr!” And then feast yer eyes on this week’s booty from the swabbies o’ Sunnyvale (and elsewhere):

• Buzz on the run: You’re about to walk into a really hot party and realize you have absolutely nothing to talk about. Whip out your mobile phone, fire up Yahoo! Go, and fly your way over to the new Yahoo! Buzz widget. You’ll find the top stories in various categories from the last 12 hours. What’s more, iPhone users can “buzz up” their favorite stories at http://buzz.yahoo.com/iphone. There. Now you’re armed and dangerous with the latest on Obama, McCain, Troopergate, and that giant insurance company you now own part of. More here.
• Call me Ishmael: The National Maritime Museum has made Britain’s finest archive of maritime photography available on The Commons on Flickr. You’ll find photos dating back to the beginnings of photography in the 1840s, including expeditions to the Arctic, exploring the Port of London, seaside images by Francis Frith, and turn of the century passenger ships. Know the names of the people depicted, or precise locations, or any other information? Get thee tagging. More here.
• Satisfy song hankerings: When you just have to listen to that song right now, and don’t feel like downloading a player, hauling out your credit card, and restarting our computer, turn to Yahoo! Search. It now offers full song playback directly from your search results page. For thousands of popular artists and songs. Just search for an artist’s name and expand the FoxyPlayer (our browser-based player) that’s peeking out from the left side of your browser, click on a song, and listen to the whole darn thing. High-fives to our buddies at Rhapsody. The only catch — you’re limited to 25 songs a month. But still, how cool is that? More here.

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The elevator doors opened one more time. An older African American man playing a guitar and a tall, handsome, impeccably dressed, young man carrying a drum around his neck board the elevator. They join the other passengers without skipping a beat. “Start wearing purple, wearing purple…” they sing as if they were part of this sing-a-along from the top floor. Everyone is smiling, singing and dancing. Camera 4 focuses on the woman in the back of the elevator. Her mouth is wide open; her hand is waving above her head in disbelief. All she intended to do was get to the lobby and go about her day. Instead, she is smack in the middle of this musical concert in “her” elevator.

A few months ago I sat across the table from Charlie Todd, New York City comedian and founder of Improv Everywhere. I laughed out loud as he outlined potential outlandish and hilarious pranks created for Yahoo!’s upcoming marketing campaign.

Charlie has a long history of pulling public pranks. Among my favorites, he has sent 45 people into Best Buy dressed in blue shirts and khakis with the simple mission “help people,” he has tricked an entire audience into thinking he was Ben Folds (at a Ben Folds concert no less) and probably most famously, he orchestrated 100 people freezing in place for two minutes inside Grand Central Station.

Charlie is one of those guys who pushes the envelope and paints outside the lines. His pranks are fun, spontaneous, irreverent and daring. Since that’s pretty much how we see our brand personality, there were obvious synergies. We decided to collaborate for the campaign.

We both loved “Elevator Music.” The prank would take place in an elevator and be a progressive sing-a-long upon descent. The key was to have one person along for the ride that had no idea what was going on. The elevator is a space that has social norms and unwritten rules. When you break these norms there is nothing to do but react (or attempt to NOT react, which in itself is a great reaction). This particular elevator was in a 34-story building in downtown Manhattan.

In late August, we rode an elevator, rigged with 9 hidden cameras and microphones, up and down all day –- with actors singing a Gogol Bordello song. Unsuspecting riders reacted in ways we could never have anticipated. Most people laughed and jumped in. Some were not amused. And many were just in complete shock. Regardless of the initial reaction, as they left the elevator and went about their day, they were touched by a little purple whether they realized it or not.

You can find the final product here. Here’s an interview with Charlie about the stunt:

There are more purple pranks to come. With Charlie’s help, we have a few more purple zingers up our sleeves to be unveiled in the next month. As for the woman in the elevator, we believe she still can’t help but quietly hum “Start Wearing Purple” every time she presses the lobby button and the doors close.

Jason Anello
Ideologist, Buzz Marketing

It’s happened to all of us. You hear a song on the radio that you really like or a tune gets stuck in your head and you just have to hear it again as soon as possible. You go to your computer and search for it… Download and install an application. Input your credit card. Restart your computer. Ten minutes later, you finally listen to your song!

But… not anymore.

Starting today on Yahoo!, we’re offering full-song playback, directly within our search pages, to make finding and listening to your favorite music easier. It’s part of our vision at Yahoo! Music to make the Web playable by removing the barriers that prevent people from clicking play and hearing music online. Check it out by searching for your favorite artist. It’s a cool integration of our FoxyPlayer — our browser-based media player — powered by our partner Rhapsody.

Search. Click play. Hear music.

Michael Spiegelman
Head of Yahoo! Music

Ever since Jerry and David began categorizing the Web back in 1994, people have visited our homepage to find out what’s happening. That’s 100 million of you in the US and 314 million of you globally starting your day on a Yahoo! homepage, so we must be doing something right. But we’re not resting on our laurels…

We know your life has changed since 1994. Most of us have upgraded from big hair, flannel shirts and Nirvana, much as Yahoo.com has evolved over the years. Today we are challenged with keeping track of everything going on in our lives, in the news, with our family and friends, etc. The Web has evolved to keep us in constant communication, but this also means we are continually receiving emails, text messages, RSS feeds, tweets and IMs. Keeping up can be a struggle.

We’re working on a new homepage that will help you get more out of the Internet, make more of your precious time, and make sense of all the things going on in your world. After lots of ongoing research (i.e., focus groups, usability experiments, etc.), today we’ve begun testing an all-new, more streamlined Yahoo.com that will bring the things that matter most to you –- no matter where they “live” on the Web. Here’s a screenshot of one of the versions we’ll be testing:

Here’s how the new Yahoo.com should simplify your life:

1. One easy check-in point. We’re testing a dashboard area (off to the left) that will let you add previews of your favorite Yahoo! and non-Yahoo! services – starting with checking for new mail from multiple accounts (initially Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail and Gmail, with more to come), weather forecasts, and local events. We plan to add plenty more preview applications in the future, so that you don’t have to spend as much time jumping from site to site just to stay plugged in.
2. Helping you stay informed. We’re always hearing how much people love the “Featured” area of the page, so we’re going to keep enhancing that with more and more fresh, timely content you’re interested in from across the Web. And of course we still have the prominent search box, with Yahoo! Search’s handy “Search Assist” feature. As we continue evolving the test versions, you’ll also notice us adding more information about what your friends are doing across Yahoo! and the Web in general.

What does all this mean to you? Since we’re testing with a fraction of homepage visitors chosen at random – starting in the US, UK, France and India – you may be one of the testers! But even if you’re not, we encourage you to share your thoughts on what you want out of your Internet starting point. Keep in mind that we plan to add lots of exciting new things over the course of these tests, since this process is all about making sure we launch the best page for our users.

We’ll keep you posted as we add new preview applications from your favorite Web sites, create more ways to easily personalize the page so that it’s focused on what matters most to you, and eventually even open it up to the Yahoo! Application Platform so that external developers and publishers can submit their own preview applications to be featured on the Yahoo! homepage.

Tapan Bhat
SVP, Front Doors, Communities and Network Services

P.S. Check out this screenshot for a sneak peek into more features we’ll be adding during the testing process.
P.P.S. Did you notice the color of the logo on our test?

There are nearly 275 million Yahoo! Mail account holders worldwide.

Since one Yahoo! Mail address is in the news today, I thought this might be a good time to remind everyone about some online safety tips that will help protect your account. (In order to protect the privacy of our users, we can’t get into specific details of any of our users’ accounts — we know you’d want us to do the same for you!).

• Choose a strong password. It’s like a toothbrush – choose a good one and don’t share it. Your Yahoo! Mail password can be any length and can contain spaces, symbols, or numbers –- letting you come up with something that’s easy for you to remember but impossible for someone else to figure out.
• Avoid using a complete word from a dictionary (English or otherwise) or a name.
• Use at least 7 characters. The more the better. A long but simple password can be safer than a shorter complex one.
• Use a combination of capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and standard symbols (! @ # $ % ^ &, etc.).
• Don’t use personal information that someone could easily figure out. Avoid a password based on information easily obtained about your (a birthday, your child’s name, your phone number, school name, etc.). Don’t use a password you already use for another account, like your bank account PIN. And don’t’ use your Yahoo! ID (or other username) in any form (reversed, capitalized, doubled, etc.).
• Avoid the obvious. Attackers tend to first try repeating letters or number sequences (123456). Stay away from “test” or “password.” And when you change your password, which you should do relatively often, don’t just add a number to the end.
• Create a sign-in seal. Yahoo! and many financial institutions let you personalize your sign-in page to help you make absolutely sure you’re not falling victim to a phishing scam. See a photo of your cat Rupert? You know it’s safe to proceed.

Cybercrime is an industry-wide issue and we’ve been working with the industry in combating it (with innovations like Domain Keys). Rest assured that we take security and privacy very seriously here.

You are the first line of defense. Head over to antispam.yahoo.com and security.yahoo.com for more tips to help you protect your account, your privacy, and your identity.

John Kremer
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail