Seventy-five years ago today, a guy in New Jersey advertised his new movie theater with: “The whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are.” That’s because he was pioneer of the drive-in movie. After you finish feeling nostalgic about flicks al fresco, check out what we put up on the screen this week:

• Flickr groupies: If you’re a Flickr user who loves to share and share alike, you’ll dig the new groups feature that just debuted. Now when you visit any group, you’ll see an “Add Photos” link that launches a new tool that lets you add up to 6 photos or videos at a time from your photostream, your sets, tagged items, geo-tagged items, items uploaded on a specific date, etc. It makes it a whole lot easier to participate in groups that float your boat — whether you’re into photos of Utrecht, spiderwebs, backpacking the Northwest, polydactyl cats, or altered street signs.
• Opening your address book: Personal information geeks just scored big time. We’ve released the API for Yahoo! Address Book. What, you’re not schooled in browser-based authentication? Well, let’s just say the developer world is going to have a lot of fun building useful products and features for you by gaining authorized access to Yahoo! Address Books. Imagine taking your Address Book with you whenever you shop for gifts online. Or confidently allowing a third-party social network site to make it easy for you to send invitations to your contacts. Or being able to look up phone numbers for mobile applications. We can’t wait to see what those developers come up with.
• My (green) Yahoo!: With oil reaching an historic $140 a barrel, who doesn’t want to become obsessed with greener alternatives? Time to populate My Yahoo! with pertinent goods. The Hybrid Cars module lets you stay on top of all things Prius, plugin hybrid, and beyond. And the green-travel module from Yahoo! Groups lets you keep tab on tips from other environ-enthusiasts. It’s good for you, it’s good for the Earth.

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From our travels across cyberspace, it’s pretty clear that the social part of the Internet is becoming more and more important to people. From chat to games to messaging to sharing things like news, entertainment, pictures, maps, movies and other “favorites,” users are looking for more ways to give contacts a sense of who they are and what they’re into. As social applications take the mash-up world by storm, a growing number of companies and data sources are opening up to give people the information they want, and developers are scrambling to create new applications that connect users with friends and colleagues.

Yahoo! has always been about helping users find and share information online, and we love giving our broad and loyal developer community the tools they need to keep innovating on this front. They echo our passion for creating the best Web experience for our users.

In this same spirit, we announced today that we’ve joined forces with Google and MySpace to create the OpenSocial Foundation, and will also begin supporting the OpenSocial standard. Industry consortiums such as this often start slowly and evolve over time. So far, OpenSocial is rapidly growing and adapting, but still in the early stages. We feel that this is the right step at this stage in its evolution. It’s no longer a trial balloon — it’s for real. We are taking this opportunity to help ensure websites and developers feel confident using OpenSocial as the building blocks for their new social apps.

We already offer Web services and APIs through the Yahoo! Developer Network that make it easy for developers to build applications and mashups that integrate data sources in new ways. We think OpenSocial will continue to fuel this innovation and make the Web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions.

We can only imagine the possibilities of what creative developers and publishers will do with these tools. Stay tuned for more on how we’ll be supporting OpenSocial and driving the OpenSocial Foundation to create an open and increasingly social Web.

Wade Chambers
VP of Platforms