As you no doubt saw earlier today, financier Carl Icahn has announced that he intends to nominate a slate of ten directors to our board of directors at our annual stockholder meeting. Here’s the letter he sent to our chairman, Roy Bostock, and here’s a response we just issued.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

You silently grieve every time you open your drawer — all those lonely socks whose mates went missing on their last trip to the laundry room. Well, today is Lost Sock Memorial Day. A time to mourn, eulogize… and then face the music and admit those tootsie warmers ain’t never coming back. After you’re done purging, here’s what we got out of our system this week:

• Safe from harm: Like the real world, the Web can have some crummy neighborhoods. That’s why we launched SearchScan, a new safety feature built into Yahoo! Search, courtesy of the security experts at McAfee. No more unwittingly clicking on dangerous links that might download spyware, malware, or other nefarious wares. You’ll get a warning label next to questionable web sites, including those that might have dubious email practices that include spammy missives in your inbox. We just don’t want you going to the wrong side of the street. More here.
• Your every move: Those cats at MyBlogLog are making it easier to keep tabs on what your community of contacts is up to. They’ve just added Yahoo! Answers, Google Reader, and the cool new video startup Seesmic to the nearly 50 popular services you can track in your “New With Me” lifestream. Make a move? MyBlogLog will post that event for all to see. More here. They also just cooked up an Add Services Shortcut (with a most unfortunate acronym) that assumes that you use the same screenname at multiple sites. Their script monkeys scan the services for your ID and let you add them with a single click.
• Seeing is believing: You’re a visual person. You like pretty pictures. Then Glue Pages Beta is for you. Over across the Big Pond, the Yahoo! India Search team just launched a new concept for search that sticks text, images, and video content together into a single results page. Available for select terms across categories like health, sports, entertainment, travel, technology, and finance, it gives you various takes on a given topic. For example, “Barak Obama” brings back results on Wikipedia, Yahoo! News, Memeorandum.com, videos, images, blogs, and RSS feeds for the most active political news sources. More here.
• Searchin’ Safari: This isn’t so much product news, as just good news… for Mac users. We just acquired Inquisitor, which created a Safari browser plug-in that auto-completes search queries and pops up results along with ideas to help refine. It’s not unlike our own Search Assist feature. Download it here and keep your eyes peeled for future innovations.

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

In case you haven’t already seen the news, Microsoft today withdrew its proposal to acquire Yahoo!. Here’s our press release, with comments from Yahoo! board chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

I hope you did your laundry, because today is No Pants Day. A tradition started in Austin, Texas (no doubt a part of the “Keep Austin Weird” conspiracy), its goal is simply to “revel in the absence of pants.” (And, no, kilts don’t count.) Before you hit the town in your bloomers, have a look at how we did it one leg at a time this week:

• del.icio.us gets foxy: Firefox users just got a del.icio.us treat — a new Firefox extension that fully supports Firefox 3 (while working just fine with Firefox 2, thank you). Its handy features include keyboard shortcuts for accessing bookmarks (just hit F2) and a new bookmark-saving layout. It’s a beta release, so the team is eager to hear if you have feedback before the official launch. More here.
• YT? Can you hear this?: Got Vista? Check. Got Yahoo! Messenger? Check. Now you can make PC-to-PC calls to your Yahoo! Messenger pals, or even dial landlines and mobile phones. Just for fun, you can even animate your voices as you talk. The all-new voice-enabled beta version of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista also lets you SMS your friends’ mobile phones for free. The team’s been busy adding features you’ve been requesting, and now they’re setting their sights on webcam video, archiving, photo sharing, and more. Hang in there with them. Download the new version here.

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

You’re busy. You read fast. You have a lot more blogs to go today. But before you move on, wanna take two seconds to give us a little feedback? We’ve just added an insta-ratings system to every post, which will help us get a sense for what you dug and what outright bombed (it’s ok, thick skin). In each post footer, you’ll find five dots. Click, boom, done.

To aid you in your rating decision-making, here are some suggested criteria for selecting from one to five dots:

5 — Epic. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
4 — That rocked. Though it could’ve used a little more je ne sais quoi.
3 — That hit the spot. Thanks.
2 — Meh.
1 — Wow. That sucked. No more of that, please.

Note that you can only rate a post once. So don’t get trigger happy. Thank you kindly.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

I do. And so does everyone else in our Northern California offices. Her name is Danielle Bricker. And she is singularly responsible for getting people out of their gas-guzzling cars and into far-more-pleasurable, alternative modes of transportation (WiFi shuttle buses, commuter trains, light rail, bikes, van pools, carpools, etc.).

With the title of “Commute Coordinator,” Danielle is likely a maverick in Corporate America. She’s not only a cheerleader for a greener way of life (literally walking the walk), she’s there to help every Yahoo figure out the most practical way from Point A to Point B. And she has a good answer for just about every excuse you can come up with: “What if my kid gets sick in the middle of the day and I have no car?” Our guaranteed ride home program won’t cost you a dime. “But I’ll get sweaty on my bike!” We’ve got showers. “No one else works my hours.” Let me check my database of carpoolers.

Here’s a report NBC just ran about Danielle and our commute program, inspired by photos she took on a recent commute from San Francisco.

With fossil fuel flirting with $4 a gallon, you need to get yourself a Danielle.

Props to Paul Stamatiou, former Yodel intern, for his great how-to on embedding Flickr slideshows.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Would you believe it was only 55 years ago today that we first understood how genes were passed from generation to generation? Can you say double helix? After pausing to honor the granddaddies of molecular biology, check out what was in our deoxyribose nucleic acid this week.

• Would you like to touch our SearchMonkey?: If you’re a developer or site owner clamoring for a chance to monkey with enhanced Yahoo! search results, sign up for a developer preview of SearchMonkey or mark your calendar for our May 15th developer launch party. It’s our first step toward a totally new open Yahoo! strategy. Buh bye, links and abstracts. Hello, rich results with data like images, deep links, ratings, reviews, etc.!
• Circle of refinement: Yahoo! Local just made narrowing search results vastly easier with that rockstar of geometry: the circle. Looking for a greasy spoon for breakfast, but want one close to the ocean? Click “expand map” on your search query results and move that circle around to whatever ‘hood you’re looking for and make the radius bigger or smaller. As you move the circle, the business results automatically update. Brings new meaning to search radius. More here.
• Share your Flickr love: See something on Flickr and just can’t contain yourself? In this world of instant gratification, it’s now easier than ever to share photos, videos, sets, and groups with Flickr’s simple new “share this” button. Everpresent on the upper right side, it beckons you to email, link to, blog about, or get the HTML code to embed pictures and videos. What’s more, it will auto-complete screen names of your contacts as you type. All the more easy to spread the love. More here.
• Ain’t nothin’ better than free: You’re about to toss your old bottle cap collection when you realize there just might be a 10-year-old aching for a Nehi Red to complete his. That’s when you go check out our “Free is Good” microsite, launched in honor of Earth Day. It’s based on the old “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” adage and it’s there to help you find reuse groups in your neck of the woods. In addition to the warm feeling you’ll get inside from getting cool stuff and keeping other stuff out of landfills, you’ll have a shot at scoring eco-friendly prizes like a Smart car, a trek to a national park, a trip to an eco-resort, a home energy audit, local organic food or public transit for a year, or even free toilet paper (hey, who doesn’t need that?). Get thee green!
• Gimme your digits: You’ll never have to ask that again with the new MyBlogLog feature that lets you instantly add your MyBlogLog contacts and other members to your address book. They’ve rolled out one-click access to vCards (for Outlook, Thunderbird, Address Book on Macs, etc.) and hCards (for you more sophisticated microformats fan). Your info will reflect whatever you specified in your privacy settings. There’s nothing quite like portable data. More here.

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

When it comes to the hall of fame of the Web 2.0 world, the CNET Webware 100 Awards is as close as it gets. And here comes the shameless self-promotion… Yahoo! just brought home a fistful of trophies for having the best Web applications represented in 8 out of the 10 categories.

Making it onto this list isn’t easy. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations, the editors selected 300 finalists. Then they took it to the people for the popular vote, selecting the 100 top products in 10 different categories. After nearly two million votes were cast, our friends from Yahoo! Front Page/Search, Flickr, Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Calendar, and Yahoo! Briefcase were all recognized by the community for offering a favorite app. And rest assured, they heart you back.

Check out the whole list of winners here .

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Today marks a 102-year anniversary that fortunately very few people remember… when a 7.9 tremblor rattled streets, buildings, and teeth in San Francisco. After comfortably denying it could ever happen again, check out our earth-shaking updates:

• Your city is big time now: Ever been frustrated that your city doesn’t rank when it comes to online city guides? Seeth no more. Whether you live in Kailua, Kinnelon, Killingworth or Kennebunkport (or any large metropolis around the world, for that matter), you’ll find your city in the new Yahoo! Our City. It dynamically scrapes what’s available on the Net — Flickr photos, news, events, weather, videos, blogs, maps — and melds them together in a single comprehensive snapshot. The fruit of a Yahoo! India Hack Day winner, it’s a city guide of the people, by the people, and for the people. For every citizen around the world. More here and on their blog.
• MyBlogLog Tweets:The team at MyBlogLog is embracing the 140-character Web. They’ve launched their own Twitter account to help keep you up to speed on goings on, as well as make it easy for you to lob over comments and quick questions. So go follow MyBlogLog and don’t skip a beat. More here.
• Even hackers have taste: If you’ve spent time at the Yahoo! Developer Network in the past, you might have noticed its radical face lift. Not only does it have a clean new 21st-century look (we didn’t want to rush anything), it now has “improved navigation and information architecture built to meet the needs of the lazy and impatient developers” among you (their words, not mine). You’ll also find more timely content, with four content tabs about the latest and greatest at all times. There’s also an Upcoming events stream for rubbing elbows with Tech Yahoos and lots of YDN Theater goodness. We even used our own popular YUI library components to rebuild the site. It’s all about eating dog food around here.

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

There’s nothing like a pre-earnings quiet period to keep a corporate blogger on her toes. So I’ve scrounged around for some virtual hold music. And I found it in the form of a brilliant time lapse video that captures a day in the life at our headquarters, our local scenery, and the action around our Times Square billboard in NYC.

It was a little HD experiment created by Brad Williams, the production lead for Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker program. It’s his version of “Koyaanisqatsi” in three minutes.

Beats muzak.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor