Twenty-three years ago today, the Internet Engineering Task Force first met with the mission of developing Internet standards. You know, seeking agreement on minor things like TCP/IP and Internet protocols, so that routers and packets and switches would all cooperate with one another in order to bring you cool things like what we've cooked up this week:

• Status on steroids: If you've set up your Yahoo! Profiles page, you've been reaping the benefits of Yahoo!'s new social capabilities. Today, Yahoo! Profiles ventures beyond these purple walls to include updates from more than 20 sites. That means that you can now see when a contact posts a new review on Yelp, uploads to SmugMug, uploads a video to YouTube, blogs on Blogger, rates a song on Pandora, or tweets on Twitter. The world's getting smaller as we speak. More here.
• Piping hot news: What do you get when you combine Yahoo! News with Twitter? A breaking news search engine. Yahoo! engineer Vik Singh took his brainchild, Yahoo! BOSS (or Build Your Own Search Service), and put it to use to create what he calls TweetNews. It's a clever mashup that takes stories on Yahoo! News and combines them with topics that are spiking on Twitter -- a new way to find news that is both timely and important. And another great marriage of traditional and social media. Give it a whirl. More here and here.

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