There’s a mountain in South Dakota that took this whole costume thing pretty seriously. Sixty-seven years ago today, the last monumental granite visage was completed as Mount Rushmore decided to be Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Jefferson for Halloween. Here are the treats we handed out this week:

• My Election: Want to effortlessly follow the final stretch of the (loooooong) road to the White House from your My Yahoo! with the click of a button? Add the new pre-loaded Election ‘08 tab. You’ll find the latest news from all the major news services via Yahoo! News and blog content from Washington Whisper, The Trail, RealClearPolitics.com, and FactCheck.org. And this being a non-partisan module, you’ll find both official Republican and Democratic party blogs (though you can easily ditch the one you most disagree with). You can even add messages from your favorite campaign HQ to your page. Get it here.
• Virtual voting: Bumper sticker? Check. Campaign button? Check. Window sign? Check. Just when you thought you’d done all you could to get people to vote, along comes Yahoo! Avatars election gear. You can outfit your Avatar with your favorite campaign t-shirt, an elephant/donkey hat or stuffed animal, an “I voted” button, and even put yourself in the Oval Office, the White House Press Center, or in front of Air Force One. (Green, Constitution and Libertarian parties, we’ve got you covered, too.) And if you use Messenger 9.0, you can fire up audibles from influential characters like Abraham Lincoln, Uncle Sam, and the Statue of Liberty. More here.

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

In five days, our country (and no doubt many others) will be transfixed by — nay, obsessed with — Election Day.

Will we have our first African American president or our first female vice president? Who will be tasked with leading us out of these economic doldrums? Who will decide the fate of the war on terror? Who will solve the health care crisis and stop our addiction to oil?

If you’re an undecided voter or just want to make sure you’re watching this race to the finish, you might want to go live on Yahoo! Elections until November 4th. Even I was surprised by how jam-packed it is with helpful information. In addition to the latest news, you’ll find poll results, opinions and editorials, videos, the most blogged-about stories, great interactive modules like the Political Dashboard and Electoral College predictors, a candidate truth-o-meter, and a tally of newspaper endorsements.

And then there’s the fun stuff, like the campaign button you can put on your blog, candidate photos on Flickr, and a political quiz to see how much you’ve kept up with what the campaigns have said about each other. And don’t miss the “Create Your Scenario” feature in the Dashboard, which lets you try your hand at punditry and predict the election night outcome. Save it and compare it to calls by the likes of Arianna Huffington, Joe Trippi, and Newt Gingrich or even past elections. Sounds like a ballot party activity!

And if you’re like me, living in a state with its usual crushing number of propositions and referendums to decipher, you’ll appreciate the site’s “state” tab, which leads you to the latest wire headlines, local news and broadcast news for your locale.

Speaking of which, if you live in California, here’s a brief parenthetical. As you probably know, Proposition 8 is a proposed constitutional amendment that would overturn the state supreme court’s May decision to legalize same-sex marriage. More than 50 of Silicon Valley’s top leaders have given their personal support to No on Prop 8. Our own Jerry Yang, David Filo, Sue Decker, and Hilary Schneider are joining executives from organizations like Google, Intuit, Facebook, eBay, Cisco, Federated Media, Adobe, Reunion.com, Shopping.com, Sequoia Capital, and Twitter. They believe taking away rights from one group of people would set our state – and our country – back in the fight for fundamental fairness and equal rights. To learn more, head to pride.yahoo.com.

What seems like the longest campaign marathon in history will soon come to an end – along with the vitriol about socialism, terrorists, Caribou Barbies, mavericks, and sneaky tax policies. Hope, change. Reform, victory. Are you ready? Get out and vote!

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Two years ago, we joined a number of stakeholders with the goal of setting standards for doing business in markets that present human rights challenges. Yesterday, we unveiled the results of our collective effort — a human rights code of conduct known as the Global Network Initiative. We’re confident this initiative creates a platform for positive change.

These principles provide a valuable roadmap for companies like Yahoo! operating in markets where freedom of expression and privacy are unfairly restricted. The code also requires that participating companies make a number of commitments (with independent accountability), including among others:

• Conducting human rights impact assessments to identify circumstances where freedom of expression and privacy may be jeopardized an advanced.
• Training employees on procedures to protect freedom of expression and privacy when faced with unfair government demands and restrictions.
• Being transparent with users when required by governments to remove content or limit access to information and ideas as well as circumstances where disclosure of personal information may be required.
• Considering challenging governments in court or other forums when faced with restrictions that appear inconsistent with domestic and international laws and standards.
• Engaging in individual and collective policy advocacy for change in places where laws or practices don’t adequately protect citizens’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy.

Does this mean repressive regimes will stop censoring content or demanding information on their own citizens? No. But, we think this initiative will eventually make it more difficult for them to do so, with companies and human rights advocates united against unreasonable and unlawful demands.

Despite the two years of arduous work among companies, human rights groups, academics, investors, and policy advocates, launching the Global Network Initiative is in many ways just the start. We expect the initiative to evolve, and we hope these standards will take root and grow into global guidelines for even more companies worldwide. All the participants in the initiative are acutely aware of today’s online challenges and we believe we’ve created a framework for addressing the trends we see for tomorrow.

The Internet is transformative. We’ve seen it empower individuals, modernize economies, improve healthcare, strengthen education and raise awareness of local, national, and international events. Today, at the start of this next phase of our collective journey in the field of business and human rights, we strive to ensure technology remains a force for good for citizens around the world. You can read more about all of our human rights efforts here.

Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo

Back in April, we rolled out our vision for a more open Yahoo! — with “open” defined as rewiring Yahoo! so we could 1) open our network to outside innovation, 2) unlock the power of your social relationships, and 3) mesh your Yahoo! experience with other sites to bring you the best of the Web.

Today that vision takes another important step forward. We’re officially cutting the ribbon for talented developers everywhere, who are now welcome to come in and access our tools and data so they can build applications for a more customized, social, and relevant Yahoo! network and beyond.

I won’t bore you with the plumbing — you can head over to our developer network for those details — but let me summarize the potential impact on you the user as developers dig in and begin to build their applications.

Most obvious will be the social aspects. At a high level, we’re rolling out a social platform that will draw on the hundreds of millions of connections on Yahoo! – everything from random encounters with someone who commented on the same photo as you, to deep connections you have with friends who know nearly everything about you. By using the social contacts you already have on Yahoo! — through Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Finance, Fantasy Sports, etc. — we’ll make those social connections more active and useful. Most importantly, by enabling developers to make your social connections specific to the Yahoo! service you’re using, we believe you’ll enjoy some incredibly unique and creative new experiences that we would never have thought of.

There’s really no limit to the potential, but here are a few examples:

• Share updates and discover new things online: You’ll be able to see what your friends are doing on Yahoo! (like entering ratings on Yahoo! Movies or buzzing articles on Yahoo! Buzz) and off our network (like the blog post they just commented on, photo they’ve uploaded, movie they’ve rented, or the restaurant they just reviewed). And on the flip side, you can share your activities with them, helping them stay in touch with you more easily. Basically, we’re letting developers centralize anything you do on the Web as an update on our platform — with your explicit permission, of course. And it will be that much easier to discover great new things through the people and relationships most relevant to you. (Who knew that Uncle Jim loved “When Harry Met Sally” so much?) And publishers love this because they get exposed to more visitors whose friends implicitly recommend their content.
• A universal profile: We’ve begun the process of consolidating everyone’s Yahoo! experience onto a new, single profile so that everyone has a control panel — a central place where they can manage the new “open” applications that they decide to use and the social connections they have across Yahoo!.
• Make your Address Book truly portable: You can make your address book available to an online merchant so you can more easily ship friends a gift, or be reminded when it’s time to send them an online birthday card. Even beyond the Address Book, we’ve built the whole system with the mentality that any personal data that you put into Yahoo! is inherently your data; you own it, and you can give it to anyone or take it anywhere you would like.
• Customize Yahoo! like never before: Want to track your eBay auction? Is CNN your favorite news outlet? What’s next in your Netflix queue? Pull them all into the Yahoo! homepage so you can see everything that’s important to you in one place. We’ll open select properties like My Yahoo!, Mail and our front page so that you can let third-party applications become part of those sites as you see fit.
• Find and connect with new people: Based on whom you already know and interact with — on Yahoo! and off — we’ll make suggestions for more people to add to your social circle. And we’ll help you prioritize all of your connections, particularly as they communicate with you in Yahoo! Mail.

We’ve done all of this in a way that keeps Yahoo! as safe and secure as ever, while also building in full privacy and permission control so you’ll have complete control over things like what you broadcast publicly and what information you share with third-party sites, etc.

As of today, developers can start using our newly available data on their own web sites and even start deploying new applications into Yahoo!. You won’t find these externally developed applications built into your favorite Yahoo! service just yet — that’s coming soon. But starting today, you could discover new apps either by invitation from a friend or by noticing via your Profile or Messenger updates feed that a connection is using the app.

Reaching this step in our Yahoo! Open Strategy has been a significant effort, requiring hundreds of developers in offices around the world. We’ve even worked hand-in-hand with Google, MySpace, and many other of our traditional competitors as partners in this effort. We mean it when we say we’re open!

Like any initiative that thrives on the ingenuity of third party developers, we expect our open platforms to evolve and improve based on their feedback. This is very much an initial release. But we’re anxious to see what developers out there have up their sleeves and what you’ll do with it.

Jay Rossiter
Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Open Strategy

What generally increases when the overall economy declines? That’s right – crime. And these days, when you receive an email that proclaims that you’ve won the “Yahoo! Lottery,” the financially-pressured optimist in you might be more inclined to bite the bait.

Last May, we filed a lawsuit against “Yahoo! Lottery” spammers who use our brand to trick unsuspecting users into handing over personal data to claim a prize. And we’re making progress on catching these scammers, but we’re concerned that they may step up efforts to dupe people impacted by these tough times.

Today we announced a public-private coalition with Microsoft, the African Development Bank, and Western Union to allow victims of lottery scams to upload police reports we can use with the goal of tracking down these devious criminals and developing better ways of protecting people online. INTERPOL has gotten involved to inform international law enforcement agencies about the initiative and provide guidance on critical information to collect to identify trends and common patterns.

Here’s how it works. Yahoo! and the other coalition members have set up dedicated email addresses and Web sites (ours is http://antispam.yahoo.com/phishingtips) where lottery scam victims — those who took the bait and handed over personal information — can share details of the police report they have filed. These reports may be helpful to other coalition members and law enforcement in fighting lottery scammers.

For readers who spot a scam but don’t fall for it, we have tips for you, too. First off, don’t ever reply to the message, even as a joke. You don’t want to be encouraging these guys. Instead, click the “Spam” button, which helps us and our anti-spam systems block these types of messages and kick these criminals off the Internet. We also have a form you can use to report lottery scams and other kinds of abuse originating from Yahoo! users.

As we’ve said before, no one ever wins the Yahoo! Lottery. And that’s simply because there is no Yahoo! Lottery. We’re on a mission to protect you from these online predators, but in addition to what we’re doing on our end, you can also find some tips on how you can protect yourself on our anti-spam resource site.

Mark Risher
Anti-Spam Czar, Yahoo! Mail

Seventy-nine years ago today, on Black Thursday, the first of the three major U.S. stock market crashes began, starting a three-year slide that stripped the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 89% in value. (And you thought today’s crisis was bad.) If bad luck comes in threes, we might all be good to go! Here’s what we did to beat the bear this week:

• Shortcut to cheap gas: Ok, so crude oil may have dipped below $70 a barrel, but you know that won’t last. And in this economy, who wants to spend more than they have to on anything? Yahoo! Search just launched a shortcut to help you find the cheapest gas in town. Just type “gas prices” or “cheap gas” plus your city name or zip code into our search box, and you’ll get a comprehensive list of the cheapest local stations (courtesy of GasBuddy.com), their address, and even a map as part of your search results. Stuff the rest of your nickels in your mattress. More here.
• Inquisitor branches out: You know that really cool Safari browser plugin that we bought and then enhanced? The one that auto-completes search queries and previews results along with ideas to help refine your search? Well, it’s become an equal opportunity app, available now for Firefox and IE7 and 8 browsers. And now Inquisitor generates more personalized results (based on a crazy smart algorithm) and helps you find your bookmarks faster. More here.
• Color control freak: You love the different themes and colors available for personalizing your My Yahoo! page. But you fancy yourself a designer and wish that blueberry could be more aqua, that maraschino more salmon. Enter customizable colors! Just log in to My Yahoo!, click “Change Appearance,” and head to “Customize Color” and have at it. You can create up to nine different colored themes, picking hues for your header, sub-header, page background, and content area. Color me in charge.
• Halloween help:The countdown to All Hallows Eve is on, so head over to our Halloween microsite for helpful tips and advice for maximizing this most ghoulish of holidays. You’ll find things like pumpkin carving patterns, a compendium of the most popular costumes (it’s not too late), tips for a greener Halloween, a really scary movie guide (and recipes for pumpkin-y things to eat while you watch them), and a tag cloud with the most popular search terms o’ the season. But, sorry, no tips for toilet papering the mean guy’s house.

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

One of the key dynamics that is re-shaping the Web these days is “social” – social networks, social graph, social bookmarking, social news, social gaming. A rapidly growing segment of Web users is making connections, discovering new things based on feeds, and staying on top of relationships using a variety of social destinations and services.

That’s why we’ve been hard at work integrating a new social foundation into Yahoo!. Today, as part of this, we’re upgrading profiles.yahoo.com with a new universal profile. Available in beta to all of our users around the world, Yahoo! Profiles is a centralized control panel that lets you manage your identity, activities, interests, and connections across Yahoo! — and eventually the entire Web. The new profile is a key element of our Yahoo! Open Strategy, rewiring Yahoo! to make it more open and social.

I want to make it clear that this new profile is not intended to be a new social destination on Yahoo!. Rather, our plan is to integrate “social” as a central dimension into the services you use every day. For example, if you’re on Yahoo! Messenger 9.0, you’re already seeing Yahoo! Buzz, Mybloglog, and Twitter updates as part of your friends’ status messages. Soon you’ll see social capabilities added elsewhere across Yahoo!, beginning with places where you start your day. The new homepage we’re testing will soon have an application that lets you stay up to date with what your friends are doing across the Web. And Yahoo! Mail will be delivering a smarter inbox, displaying emails from your most important connections first.

As you set up your new profile, you’ll see that we’re starting out with the basics. You can enter information about yourself (location, work experience, interests, photo, etc.) and add connections from your Yahoo! Address Book. As we start adding social capabilities to services like the Yahoo! homepage, Mail, and Messenger, your profile information will be used as the trusted source of identity and social preferences. This will be extended across the Web as developers begin using the open APIs we’re offering as part of our Yahoo! Open Strategy, allowing them to build more social experiences based on your preferences. (Note: The updated profile will not immediately be used by Yahoo! 360. More details are explained here.)

Ultimately, our goal is to unify your social experience and connections not only on Yahoo!, but anywhere you travel across the Web. Rolling out the new profile today is a just first step, and I look forward to sharing more details with you in the coming months as we “light up” social experiences at Yahoo!.

Jim Stoneham
Vice President, Communities

In elementary school, other girls told me that becoming an astronaut was “for boys.” So when I was 11 (in 2002), I founded Astrotots Science Camp for Little Dippers. I was determined to make sure other girls had exposure to the fun side of science. AstroTots provides activities girls enjoy, like theme-related arts and crafts and also introduces them to the excitement of experiments and some of the scientific “whys” behind things we know about our universe. Our camps focus mostly on “at risk” girls because I feel like a good science education can be a ticket out of poverty for them. This project has spread from my small town in Utah all across the US and even internationally. Supported by grants and donations, thousands of girls have learned that science is COOL.

It was such an amazing thrill to be selected as Yahoo!’s Young Pioneer of Purple. As part of their Start Wearing Purple campaign, the Young Pioneer of Purple program recognizes young people who are making a significantly positive impact on the world. To help me take Astrotots one step further, Yahoo! is giving my nonprofit a $10,000 grant. This just blows us away!

Yahoo! also flew my team to San Francisco to host a science camp for local elementary school students at the incredible new California Academy of Sciences. Yahoo! hosted kindergarteners and 4th and 5th graders to be a part of my science camp. We started off with a tour of the 4-story rain forest and underground aquarium. Then, my team members and I set up a few hands-on activity stations where students made rubber band rockets, Play-Doh Martian landscapes, and Styrofoam ball planets. Working with these bright, engaged kids was so much fun. I had to smile because many told me afterwards that they wanted to become scientists. That means we’re doing our job.

I hope that featuring AstroTots on Yahoo! will show other young people that we really do have the power to change the world. I want youth to know that sometimes all it takes to make a difference in your community is to be the person who is willing to try. You DO have something to offer, go make it happen!

Editor’s Note: We are looking for more Young Pioneers of Purple to feature on our Start Wearing Purple site, so if you know someone aged 13-21 who’s is changing the world, nominate them now.

Becca Robison
Founder, Astrotots Science Camp for Little Dippers
Layton High School Junior, Layton, Utah

Cholesterol be damned. It’s World Egg Day. An occasion for celebrating the greatest of all comfort food. Because with times like these, we could all use a bit more of that. Here’s what we hatched this week:

• Snazzy schedule: Just like any tween, Yahoo! Calendar was worried about how it looked. So at age ten, it got a serious makeover, ushering this web calendar into a great new age of drag and drop, iCalendar integration, IM/SMS/email reminders, and Flickr loveliness. And coming soon are Outlook and iPhone synching and event discovery with Upcoming and other Yahoo! properties. Our little calendar — all grown up.
• Handsfree search: If you’ve got a certain BlackBerry or Nokia phone, it’s time to clear your throat. Voice-enabled mobile search is now available on multiple BlackBerry and Nokia devices. If you have one of a number of Nokia Series 60 phones (like the N95), you’ll find voice recognition in the home-screen shortcut of OneSearch 2.0 (get it here: m.yahoo.com/shortcut). And if you use Yahoo! Go 3.0 (get it here: http://get.go.yahoo.com/) and have select BlackBerry, Nokia Series 40, and Nokia Series 60 models, you’ll be able to find stock quotes, sports score, and just about anything else by simply yapping into your phone. And we know you know how to do that. It’s available in the US, UK, India, Singapore, the Philippines, and Canada.

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

Have you ever bailed on an online checkout because something in the user experience bugged you? Or were pleasantly surprised that the sponsored listings were more relevant than the regular results of your web search? This week, we are rolling out a new service that creates a helpful feedback loop for e-merchants, website owners, advertisers, and developers based on how well they did with you in critical moments like these.

Born out of our acquisition of IndexTools in May, Yahoo! Web Analytics (beta) provides powerful data and insights reporting that help website owners evaluate their marketing performance and tweak their website designs. They’ll get custom real-time reports and graphs that help them slice and dice metrics like sales, page views, and sources of traffic and ultimately identify ways to amp up their visitor satisfaction.

We’re rolling the service out in phases for the remainder of 2008 and into next year. The first big deployment is Yahoo! Small Business, whose 13,000 hosted e-commerce customers can get set up just in time for the holiday shopping season at the click of a button. We have already started to roll Yahoo! Web Analytics out to advertisers who seek Yahoo!’s help to build custom micro-sites, as well as to third-party application developers who build widgets and other mini-apps for Yahoo! users via our developer network or our new Yahoo! Open Strategy tools.

Nothing is worse for site owners—and consumers—than bad marketing or a lousy user experience. Here’s an easy tool designed to combat them… and fast.

For more information, please visit http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/ and check out the FAQ.

Jitendra Kavathekar
VP, Yahoo! Web Analytics