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?

Imagine bringing together your circle of friends and your social networks into one easy-to-use mobile application. Imagine no more. Our mobile team has just rolled out Yahoo! oneConnect for the iPhone, reinventing the way you interact with your address book. It brings multiple contact lists and different ways to communicate to that thing you never leave home without — your mobile device.

With a few quick taps on the screen of your iPhone, your entire network of contacts from social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Twitter are at your fingertips. Add to this the ability to send Yahoo! instant messages or SMS messages to those in your phone book and suddenly your address book has become more powerful and useful than ever.

With the “Pulse” feature, you get an aggregated look at what’s happening on many of your favorite social networking sites. Whether it’s a new video posted on YouTube, a friend’s new suggested song on Last.fm, or your college roommate’s latest world travels on Dopplr, you can keep up with everything that is going on throughout the day in one convenient location. With the “Favorites” feature, you can pull aside your favorite contacts to quickly keep tabs on just their activity, call them or send a quick message or email.

And did I mention it’s free?

If you have an iPhone or a iPod touch, download Yahoo! oneConnect at the iPhone App Store—and pass along the word to your friends in all of your social networks so they can stay connected on the go too! (They will thank you for it, we promise.)

For more on Yahoo! oneConnect, go to http://mobile.yahoo.com/oneconnect/iphone

Joe Hayashi
Senior Director, Yahoo! Mobile

Ever wanted to be a political pundit and call the shots on how the presidential election will play out? Ever wanted to “get behind the numbers” and understand why certain states are leaning this way or that? With the launch of our new and improved General Election Political Dashboard, you too can be the next James Carville. We’re excited about the launch and why not? More than 50% of voters now get their election news and information online — and more of them from Yahoo! News than anywhere else!

For the General Election, we’ve kept all of the cool features from the Primary Political Dashboard –- plus some new bells and whistles sure to enthrall the political junkie in all of us. At a glance, users still can see national and state poll averages and market predictions on the presidential prospects for Barack Obama and John McCain. Also, users can check out a new form of polling… candidate search results and popular search terms for each candidate. (It’s no surprise the most commonly search words for Barack Obama in recent days has been Joe Biden, but Jill Biden also has seen a big spike.) Users then can quickly scroll over each state to get a snapshot on how candidates are doing, or they can click on specific state to get key local headlines, state-wide searches, and voter demographic breakdowns. They also can click on the candidate images to pull up bios and campaign fund-raising totals. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

The new dashboard also includes a bevy of “Most Blogged About” election topics –- the first time BuzzTracker has been integrated into a Yahoo! News tool (stay tuned for more) — and gives users the chance to check out not only high-level blogs from a national standpoint, but also blogs from individual states. Who knew New Hampshire had so many bloggers writing about the election?

The “Create Your Scenario” tool allows anyone to make a call on every state based on the dashboard content and publish that content using a permalink in an email or blog. Essentially, we’ve put the power of the political pundits in your hands. Will Ohio go to Obama or McCain? Will Florida go blue or stay red? Take a stab at the electoral college and see how the numbers add up (remember: 270 electoral votes are needed to win the White House.) For inspiration, you can view celebrity scenarios (check out Arianna Huffington’s picks) and current and past election results. You can also compare your results to others to see where differences reside!

This Presidential Election truly marks a turning point — where distribution of information and content is no longer controlled by a few networks but rather can be created, consumed, and mashed up by the voters themselves. The Political Dashboard has been developed with you, the voter, in mind.

Have fun and enjoy the new features as we head into final few months of this historic election.

Alan Warms
Vice President and General Manager, Yahoo! News, Tech and Education

Everyone loves their TVs. So much so that over 37 million units were sold in North America in 2007. But how much more would you love your TV if you could monitor your eBay auctions, keep tabs on the 5-day weather forecast, and check the score of the Giants game — all at the same time you are watching the new season of “ER”? That’s just an example of what you could do with some of the exciting innovations coming out of Yahoo!’s Connected TV group.

At today’s Intel Developer Forum, Yahoo! and Intel announced the Widget Channel, the first in a series of initiatives that will bring what Yahoo! calls the “Cinematic Internet” even closer to living rooms across America.

The Widget Channel is a television application framework optimized for TV and related consumer electronics devices that use the Intel Architecture. The Widget Channel will be powered by the Yahoo! Widget Engine, an applications platform that will enable TV viewers to interact with and enjoy a rich set of TV Widgets, or small Internet applications designed to complement and enhance the traditional TV watching experience and bring content, information and community features available on the Internet within easy reach of your remote control.

TV Widgets will introduce a new way of interacting with your television. Just imagine that you are watching Dancing With the Stars and you get a phone call from your friend about new Flickr photos they uploaded. But the new season of your favorite reality show has just started, and you don’t want to miss any of the action. You don’t have to go anywhere to view the Flickr album. With a click of your remote, you can bring up the TV Widget dock at the bottom of your TV screen. Your favorite episode of Dancing With the Stars is still viewable, so you can watch your show uninterrupted and check out the new pictures your friend is so eager for you to see.

With the Cinematic Internet, Yahoo! will help to create and enable the ecosystem of Internet-connected TV, which will benefit consumers, device makers, advertisers and publishers. By combining the Internet’s benefits of openness, community and personalization with the broadcast values of dependability and familiarity of TV, we believe this combination will transform traditional TV into something bigger, better, and more exciting for users, content providers and equipment manufacturers—and make Yahoo! a starting point on the TV.

For more information, go visit http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/.

Patrick Barry
VP of Yahoo! Connected TV

In February, we introduced Yahoo! Buzz as a new way for you to discover, vote for, and share the content and stories that matter most to you. You also got a say in what stories might be read by millions, with the voting power to potentially get your favorite content on the Yahoo! Front Page.

Today, six months and more than 5 million users later, we’re pleased to share that we’re opening Yahoo! Buzz up so that you can “buzz up” content from any publisher on the Web.

We started with about 100 publishing partners, which quickly grew to more than 400. Sites like Salon.com and GigaOm immediately saw an impact as their traffic soared when content climbed up the list and got selected for Yahoo.com. Now that benefit can come to any site online, making it possible to give as much visibility to extraordinary content from an obscure site as major news stories from big publishers.

What does this mean for you? Anything you find on the Web is now buzzable. Any of the Web’s best current event stories, gossip, photos, videos and more can be submitted and shared on Yahoo! Buzz. You’ve already seen the “Buzz Up” buttons on many of your favorite sites, including New York Times, Us Weekly and BoingBoing. Now, as any site is able to add our button, you’ll have even more places to buzz to your heart’s content. And if you don’t see that button on a Web story you just have to share, you can submit a story right on Yahoo! Buzz. Like always, the more unique and compelling the story, the better chance your story of choice will buzz up to the Yahoo! homepage. Nice!

And for anyone publishing Web content that was not part of our beta testing, today we hope you will join Yahoo! Buzz and let our audience (of more then half a billion people!) buzz up your content, too. Joining is as simple. Just grab code from our Buttons page and paste it into your website or blog.

Thank you for continuing to make Yahoo! the place you start your day to find and share the most popular stories and videos on the Internet. We have more to come for Buzz, so stay tuned. But in the meantime: keep on buzzing!

Tapan Bhat
Senior Vice President of Front Doors, Communities and Network Services

P.S. Now that you have a Web full of info to buzz, check out the My Buzz Activity page that allows you to keep track of and share what you’ve buzzed up or down, or what you buzzed before anyone else did.

Location informs so much about where we go, what we do, and who we see. As the Web continues to evolve beyond the browser -– to mobile phones, devices, desktop widgets, etc. –- where we are when we come in contact with the Web becomes more important. Imagine being able to walk around town, whip out your phone, and quickly find events, a great new restaurant, or even people nearby.

Enter Fire Eagle. Fire Eagle is like a switchboard that allows you to easily update, manage, and share your location information with Web services and mobile products. One of the coolest things about Fire Eagle is how it helps you control your location information. You choose which Fire Eagle applications you want to share your information with and how much detail you want to share about where you are –- as broad as country or state, to as detailed as zip code or cross streets, and everything in between.

As a platform, Fire Eagle lets developers easily create location-enhanced applications for you — maps, driving directions, local weather, traffic, nearby friends, exchange rates, time zones, local radio, public holidays –- the list goes on and on. Since Fire Eagle launched in private beta in March, developers have signed up in droves and built some great apps. Go check out some staff picks now in the gallery.

Fire Eagle is about making everything on the Internet more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location. Start taking advantage of all the cool location-based services at http://fireeagle.yahoo.net.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

P.S. - Fire Eagle was created out of our Yahoo! Brickhouse office in San Francisco. The Brickhouse team is holding a party to celebrate the launch on Thursday night, at 330 Ritch, and they would love for you to join them!

You love to travel. You recently researched hotels in Thailand online. You see an ad that features the latest fare discounts from your airport to Bangkok. You’re not sure how that happened, but it’s pretty great serendipity. Now you’re booked in 37A and looking forward to tasting a proper panang curry.

That’s one scenario that demonstrates how valuable online advertising can be when it’s customized to your personal interests. It’s the kind of relevant advertising that saves you time and money – travel discounts, coupons, retailer sales, etc.

But we know that kind of customized advertising isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (or bowl of curry).

That’s why we’re introducing a new privacy choice, giving you greater choice in how you manage your privacy online by letting you opt-out of customized advertising on Yahoo.com

We announced that new capability today in a letter to Congressman John Dingell (D – Mich.), the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that recently sent an inquiry to 33 companies about ad customization. You can read the full letter here. This new choice has been in the works for some time now, but we chose to move up our announcement so that we could share this information with Congress today.

It won’t take effect until the end of the month but you can opt out today by clicking on the “Privacy Policy” link at the bottom of virtually every page on the Yahoo.com network and look for the “Opt-Out” link in the sidebar.

Since most of Yahoo! is free, we know there’s not much preventing you from up and leaving us at any time. That’s why we work hard to earn your trust. And we think that comes with offering transparency and choice about the options available to you.

Anne Toth
Head of Privacy & VP - Policy

I have them, Jimmie Rollins had some, even MJ had a few — behind every great player is a coach. A good coach transforms pure talent and desire into championships. And as the Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football ’08 cover athlete, my responsibilities include helping fantasy players improve their teams and win championships. A fantasy life coach, if you will.

As a fantasy life coach, there are some tips I can offer you to help your game, including the most important one –- draft me, Braylon Edwards, wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns, first. Did you know I hold the team record for receiving yards and caught 16 touchdowns last season, second best in the NFL? Do you know how many points that is? That’s big time… enough to make you look silly if you don’t draft me this year.

Second, gather your family, friends and co-workers around the computer and kick-off the fantasy season at http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/. The new draft is so easy your mom can use it. Yes, invite your mom to play in your league, and like any good coach I must remind you not to talk smack to your mother.

Third, sign up for fantasy football mobile features. Do you think coaches just sit around all day? No, they are on the move and they can’t afford to let the team struggle because they’re moving and shaking. It’s not acceptable for your fantasy team to be left behind because you didn’t know your receiver was injured. As of September 2nd, sign up for Yahoo! mobile at http://m.yahoo.com/fantasy and manage your team while you’re on the go.

I hope these pearls of wisdom transform your ’08 fantasy team into a championship. Check out Yahoo! Sports this season for more of my coaching tips.

Braylon Edwards
Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football ’08 Cover Athlete

Today we are flipping the switch on a new and improved Delicious, making our social bookmarking site faster, easier to use and learn, and a little easier on the eyes.

So what’s changed? It’s still the same del.icio.us, with a few great changes. Since we’ve grown from 300,000 to 5 million users since being acquired by Yahoo! two and a half years ago, a new platform was in order. It’s now faster, more reliable, and will enable us to keep up with our rapid growth.

We’ve also retooled our search engine to make it faster and smarter, with new features like searching across your social network. Delicious search gives you access to the shared memory of the Web — those sites with the most interesting or relevant content, based on human criteria. Instead of millions of links, we return the ones that real people say are the most valuable. Delicious search is social search.

But perhaps the most obvious change is the face lift we’ve given the site, with the goal of improving usability and making it easier for new users to understand. For more on the changes, head over to the Delicious blog. Or, watch this video that animates the transition from old to new:

Delicious has always been about helping people to remember, share, and discover the best of the Web, and this remains our core mission. With this release we’ve made improvements in each of these areas, and we will continue to do so. You will also see us start to harness the power of the Delicious community and give people new ways to manage and explore the overwhelming amount of information we deal with in our online lives.

Delicious is been built on the feedback of our users. We welcome you to join the conversation and the community. Come on over to delicious.com and let us know what you think on our discussion forum.

Stephen Hood
Director of Product Management
Delicious

Today, Internet science takes a big step into the clouds. In a partnership with tech giants HP and Intel, we’re creating a global, multi-datacenter research testbed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. (What’s cloud computing? Think of it as the technology that makes it possible for computing resources to be provided as a service where you only pay for what you use.)

Academic research is facing new challenges in today’s Internet age. Universities often don’t have the equipment –- hardware and software -– to maintain in-depth research at Internet scale. Academic researchers are limited in the research they can conduct, and this, ultimately constrains the amount of large-scale Web innovations coming to the marketplace.

Here at Yahoo!, we believe in open and collaborative research as the best way towards building the next generation of the Web. As part of our dynamic Academic Relations program, we’re teaming up with academia, as well as other companies and governments across the globe, to invest in and pool together the large-scale computers that will let researchers conduct truly breakthrough work on cloud computing and data storage systems.

The HP/Intel/Yahoo! Cloud Research Testbed is a significant step in that it will not only allow researchers to run applications and data on large-scale supercomputers, they will be able to experiment and conduct research on a massive scale. It’s like letting them simulate a true Web environment and that’s exactly what you need to ensure which ideas will work in the wild.

Joining us in this first-ever large-scale international consortium are Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, with contributions from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well.

This is all part of Yahoo!’s overall focus and investment in cloud computing and data infrastructure. We recently announced the formation of the Cloud Computing and Data Infrastructure Group (CCDI), a new group dedicated to building out our next-generation cloud infrastructure.

In addition, in November 2007, Yahoo! deployed a supercomputing-class data center, called the M45, for cloud computing research; Carnegie Mellon University was the first institution to take advantage of this supercomputer. In March 2008, Yahoo! announced an agreement with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to jointly support cloud computing research in India. The CRL supercomputer is one of the world’s top five supercomputers and is the first supercomputer available to academic institutions in India.

I speak for our many research scientists when I say we’re excited about this open testbed and being able to collaborate with leaders who share our same vision. The HP/Intel/Yahoo! Cloud Research Testbed is a truly global research effort, and more partners and researchers will be invited to join and participate in the program when all of the systems are up and running later this year. The sky is the limit from here on out.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Research

Photo from Nicholas_T