Today is a day near to my heart — Particularly Preposterous Packaging Day. On this occasion, we are united in cursing impervious plastic packaging that even your sharpest scissors can’t cut. And those maddening wire twisties that slow the toy-to-child introduction rate by a factor of 27. Manufacturers, are you listening?! Here’s what we made easier to open this week:

• Photo hunting: There are more than 3 billion photos and videos on Flickr — guaranteeing that you’ll find awesome captures of just about anything. Now it’s easier to wade through that massive library with the new Flickr Search. The search results page has been redesigned with new “view” controls that let you dictate whether you want the thumbnails as small, medium, or detail. There’s also an option to view search results as a slideshow. You can also click on a particular photo to launch a popup preview with more info. And, since Flickr is all about serendipity and discovery, you’ll see links to the groups, photographers, tag clusters, and places that relate to your search. Try this search for polka-dotted poodle. More here.
• Fresh and Delicious: The team over at our favorite social bookmarking site unwrapped some tasty treats this week. Delicious now has new search tools, including the ability to search within a date range and filter by tags. You’ll also find rich content (YouTube videos, Flickr images, Yelp data) right on the search results page. Since we all want to know what everybody’s up to, Delicious has added the “Fresh Bookmarks” tab to let you see the most recently-saved bookmarks that are buzzing on Twitter. And speaking of Twitter, you can now tweet your bookmarks from right within Delicious. Ditto for emailing. More here and over on the Delicious blog.
• More Messenger movies: Baby panda videos. Movie trailers. Tour de France photos. The kind of stuff we love to share. If you have Yahoo! Messenger 9.0, it’s now all that much easier to ping friends with great videos and photos. The team had added support for a slew of sites to Messenger’s inline media player — ranging from Hulu, Facebook, and Vimeo to twitpic and CollegeHumor.com. All that because you told them to. Ask, and ye shall receive. More here.

Finally, a shout-out to reader Dennis Marks for suggesting we ditch the date in our Product Pulse headlines in favor of content clues (made good sense to us!).

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

If you’ve got paraskavedekatriaphobia or friggatriskaidekaphobia, you’re avoiding black cats, walking under ladders, stepping on cracks, breaking mirrors, or even leaving the house today. Here’s how we avoided bad luck this week:

• Mobile search gets easier: The Mobile team just rolled out a bevy of updates to the Yahoo! oneSearch Shortcut to make searching on your cell even swifter. A new auto-locate feature uses cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi to detect your whereabouts so you don’t have to do any work. They’ve spiffed up Search Assist so that it remembers your recent search history (big fingered people rejoice!). And finally, it’s now available for Windows Mobile devices. More here.
• Messenger for Mac mo betta: The latest beta release of Yahoo! Messenger for Mac came out this week with new features and squashes for more than three dozen bugs. They’ve fixed issues around file transfers, display images, voice, chat rooms, stealth settings, and webcam. When you report IM spam, the offender is also added to your ignore list. And you can now choose a new message style for your conversation windows, just to shake things up. More here.
• Honest Abe in pictures: Our 16th president hit the big two-oh-oh this week and to celebrate, the Library of Congress hooked up with Flickr Commons to give you a revealing look at Abraham Lincoln over a period of 20 years. You see him from the earliest known photo through to the Civil War years, along with views from his funeral. Born into the era when photography burst onto the scene, Lincoln has been called the most photographed man of his day. More on the Flickr blog.
• So long, MyWeb: With three bookmarking services, it was time to streamline. MyWeb will ride off into the sunset on March 18th, making room for Delicious (social bookmarks) and Yahoo! Bookmarks (private bookmarks), both of which have seen recent upgrades and new features. If you’d rather take your bookmarks elsewhere, you can also migrate to third-party services with our handy export tools. More on the Yahoo! Search Blog and our help pages.

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

It’s not always enough to have a flower named after you. Sometimes you just gotta have an act of Congress to honor that flower. Today is National Poinsettia Day, tribute to Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico and a botany aficionado. He discovered the crimson harbinger of the holidays while walking south of the border and introduced it up north. Here’s what we propagated this week:

• Delicious movement: Yes, your tastiest bookmarks can now be found on your mobile device. The Delicious team just launched their mobile site — http://m.delicious.com. It’s still in beta but it lets you browse your bookmarks, tags, inbox, and other info. You can also browse popular and recent bookmarks and tags from the Delicious community. It also means that you have a good reason to 86 your phone’s bookmarks.
• Tasty noise: Of the hundreds of millions of bookmarks on Delicious, a considerable chunk are audio files. The team (they’ve been busy!) is now making it possible for you to listen to those files with a new integration with FoxyPlayer from Yahoo! Music. Even cooler, it turns bookmarks into a playlist that you can control from your browser. Check out samples for Beck, Chopin, and Christmas. More here.
• Finding Flickr friends: There are days when you totally welcome the opportunity to get lost in an aimless exploration of your Flickr contacts’ images, but sometimes you just want a little order. Thankfully, the team just updated your contacts list page, making it much easier for you to navigate contacts — especially if you have a bevy. You can sort by name, contact type, number of photos, when you added them as a contact, and their last upload.
• Messenger merriment: The Messenger team brings you holiday cheer in the form of Emoticarolers, a personalized singing telegram sung by four of your favorite emoticons. You can customize the lyrics to a popular holiday tune (from Jingle Bells to Auld Lang Syne) and send it off to your friends. Their harmony is impressive, albeit somewhat Hal-like. Create your own here.

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

Fourteen years ago, devotees of WXYC, the college radio station of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, fired up their computers and tuned in to the world’s first radio signal to be broadcast over the Internet. Now about 13 percent of Americans listen to radio online — still well more than those who subscribe to satellite radio. Here’s what we broadcast this week:

• Social buzz: Yahoo! Buzz is the latest to get into the open game. A new Updates section on Yahoo! Buzz lets you keep track of stories that your friends have buzzed up or down. Also new is a “Comments” section for individual stories so that you can weigh in with your own opinion and further the conversation. What’s more, you can give a thumbs up or down to other people’s comments, or reply to them. Lots of opportunity to mouth off! And you’ll find a personal activity hub for each of your contacts (provided they want you to see it) so you can check out their voting and commenting history.
• Take me to your leader: The next POTUS might still have 73 more days before he takes office, but it’s not too early to send him a presidential communique — via photo. The Guardian has set up a Flickr pool for people who want to send personal photo messages to Barack Obama — whether you want him to end the war, fix healthcare, adopt that puppy, or prove you wrong. It’s worth a thousand words.
• Cinco de delicioso: A big happy 5th birthday to the team at Delicious (or Del.icio.us, for you die hards). But that’s not the only number five to be celebrated. They now boast more than 5 million users, all of whom have civic-mindedly saved more than 180 million unique URLs. Cupcakes all around.

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

Twenty-seven years ago, “Video Killed the Radio Star” premiered on a cable network geared toward playing nothing but 24/7 music videos. Remember when the screen would go black as MTV employees popped a new tape into the VCR? (Remember when MTV actually played music videos?) After you pay tribute to that original batch of VJs, check out what we riffed up this week:

• Speedier, easier, tastier: Fans of social bookmarking, rejoice! Delicious just got snackier. It’s now sporting an entirely new infrastructure, making it faster and more reliable. It’s got a revamped search engine that lets you search in all kinds of new ways, including within your social network. And it has a spiffy new interface, making it easier for newbies yet familiar enough for veterans. And for good measure, the site now lives at delicious.com so you don’t have to remember where that wacky punctuation goes (although, of course, del.icio.us still works just fine). More here.
• 24 hours of Flickr: August 8th isn’t just opening day at the Beijing Olympics. It’s the start to Flickr 888 — a day-long global photo project that invites photographers around the world to snap a moment in time and share it with the group. The goal is to capture a day in the life around the world. You can only submit one photo, so make it your best shot. Stumped? Check out photos from last year’s 24 hours of Flickr. More here.
• Back to school brainiac: Brain turned to mush over the summer? Head over to our new Back to School site and do some cerebral calisthenics. An interactive module of the brain helps you understand all four lobes and offers games to help you sharpen them. You’ll also find exercises for overall brain fitness and top-10 lists of back-to-school fashions, dorm essentials, elementary school stuff, and computer gear. And you’ll get info on how to hit the books while being green and a listing of the most popular back-to-school searches. Parents and kids welcome.
• Going on a Mail Safari: If you’ve been longing to use the All-New Yahoo! Mail with your Safari browser, pine no more. Full compatibility is here. Better yet, it’s OS agnostic, so it works with both the latest Mac and Windows versions of Safari. And that’s especially handy if you switch-hit between Mac and PC at home and work. Let’s hear it for harmony. More here.

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

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 is the Summer Solstice, which means Summer’s offically here – well in the Northern Hemisphere at least. This is also the longest day of the year. Wondering what to do with those extra hours of daylight? Pull up a lounge chair, break out the tequila and check out what we’ve been up to this week.

Yahoo! Mail goes vintage: Frustrated by not being able to to get the email address you want? We’ve heard you and we’re doing something about it with the introduction of two new email domains: ymail.com and rocketmail.com. If “rocketmail” sounds familiar it’s because it’s vintage Internet. RocketMail was one of the first free webmail services in the ’90s, was acquired by Yahoo! in 1997 and formed the basis of the first version of Yahoo! Mail. So, whether your style is brand spanking new (ymail.com), hip vintage (rocketmail.com) or comfortable classic (yahoo.com), head on over to http://new.mail.yahoo.com/addresses and get the email address you’ve always wanted.

Media Player gets foxy: Check out the latest wily addition to the Yahoo! Media Player. Through a rather clever integration with FoxyTunes you can now control all of the music inside your browser as well as outside of it. The latest version of FoxyTunes enhances any page that has music on it by automatically adding the Yahoo! Media Player to that page. This allows you to play any track on that page or even the whole page as one big playlist. The best thing is that once you start playing a web page with the new player you can instantly control it with FoxyTunes, even while surfing in other tabs or browser windows – just make sure to leave the page that’s currently playing somewhere in the background. And, if you close that page, your FoxyTunes will automatically switch back to your regular media player, be it iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc. Now that’s foxy!

Kids and technology – a parents’ guide: Wondering where to find the best information on keeping kids safe on the web? Well, look no further. Yahoo! Kids launched a new Parents channel this week bringing together some of the best resources in the business. Larry Magid, longtime technology journalist, Internet safety advocate and co-director of ConnectSafely.org, will be blogging alongside Ann Collier who’s been providing some of the best kid-tech news to parents on NetFamilyNews. Together they co-authored “MySpace Unravelled: A Parents’ Guide to Teen Social Networking.” So head on over to learn how to help your kids navigate the online world safely.

Internet Explorer – more del.icio.us: Last month we unleashed an early beta release of an Internet Explorer version of our del.icio.us bookmarks extension. And this week you can now officially begin to enjoy social bookmarking on Microsoft Windows XP and Vista operating systems. While the features are similar to its Firefox 3 extension counterpart, this little number also has more unique additions including faster searching within larger accounts of bookmarks and signals for new network activity and links for you. Learn more and download it now here.

Smithsonian goes to the Commons: The Commons photo collection on Flickr welcomes its fourth member in the shape of the Smithsonian Institute. As you’d expect the collection is rich in history – from photos by the Institute’s First Photographer, Thomas Smillie, to portraits of Artists, Scientists and Inventors (yes even Albert Einstein makes an appearance) and People and The Post. The contemporary collections include American Celebrations and a documentary from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. And don’t forget to check out collections from the other three members: The Library of Congress, Australia’s Powerhouse Museum and The Brooklyn Museum.

Forget throwing salt over your shoulder and avoiding black cats. Today is Blame Someone Else Day. Late for a meeting? Forgot to charge your cell phone? Overdue mortgage payment? Just not your problem. After you’ve passed the buck to an unsuspecting scapegoat, read up on what we were culpable for this week:

• Video revisions: Head on over to Yahoo! Video and you’ll see we’ve spruced up a few features. By popular demand, you’ll now find a bevy of sharing options under each video so you can shoot it off to the world via Digg, Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. We also made it easier to check out stats, which now includes how often a video has been favorited. And, perhaps coolest of all, you can now play back videos without leaving the search results page. Makes looking for just the right baby hamster video a cinch. More here.
• Didn’t you see my blog?: If your friends get sore when you don’t keep up with their latest blogging brilliance, we’re here to help. Upgrade to Yahoo! Messenger for Windows (9.0, Beta) and your friends’ most recent blog post will show up as their status message, courtesy of the MyBlogLog wizards. You’ll also be able to keep track of their MyBlogLog activity, like when they add contacts, join communities, or add tags. As the MyBlogLog team eloquently put it, they’re helping transform your IM it into a “socially aware RSS Reader.” More here.
• Final for Firefox 3: A while back, we tested the waters with a Firefox 3 extension beta for Del.icio.us bookmarks. And now it’s official. After hundreds of thousands of downloads and copious user feedback, it’s live and kicking (and better and more stable, thankyouverymuch). It’s a great way to search and manage your bookmarks and keep tabs on your Del.icio.us network. More features are coming down the pike. Still using Firefox 2? It works just fine there, too. More here.

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

This day in history marks groundbreaking milestones that cemented America’s stature as a consumerist force to be reckoned with. Charles Hires invented root beer 142 years ago (how now, brown cow) and SpaghettiO’s (Uh-oh!) made their debut 99 years later. What’s more, it’s National Sea Monkey Day — so give a treat and a hug to those peculiar just-add-water creatures. After you give it up for marvels we can’t live without, read up on what we invented this week:

• Traffic is a good thing: That’s right, there are more traffic pileups than ever on Yahoo! Maps to help make you the wiliest driver on the road. They’ve added a panoply of new markets from Bakersfield, Calif., to Rochester, Maine, and improved markets like New York, which previously only gave you incident data. And why should freeways have all the fun, when you can find out about traffic jams on major thoroughfares. No more getting stuck on Manhattan’s Canal Street or San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue. Add in our drag-and-drop routing and your clutch will be buying you pizza. More here.
• Exploring bookmarks: Swiftly on the heels of the popular del.icio.us Firefox 3 beta extension comes an early beta release of an Internet Explorer version. Now IE users can revel in plugin features like nearly instantaneous searching with huge accounts (yeah, you, with more than 10,000 bookmarks), full sidebar and toolbar integration with bookmark synch and typedown search, and a handy indicator of new network activity and links. Download it here or discuss it here.
• Mybloglog gets friendlier: Kevin Bacon, eat your heart out. Mybloglog has just launched Friender, a quick way to grow your network of friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends… The next time you go to manage your friends and contacts, you’ll notice a “Friender” tab. It’s essentially a rank-ordered list of friends (and others they know) that you’re connected to elsewhere. Chances are, if someone knows five of your friends, you probably know them, too. You quickly fly through the list and grow your network. And the best part is it all happens in real-time. Shazam! More here.
• Monkey on the loose: It’s official. The doors to Yahoo! Search no longer have locks. SearchMonkey is open for business, inviting developers (from pros to tinkerers) to start building customized Yahoo! Search results that are even more useful and relevant. If structured data makes you quiver (think CitySearch, StumbleUpon, eBay, Epicurious, Yelp, Netflix), you’ll waste no time mashing it up to add links, reviews, contact information, reservations, etc. to your site’s search listing. And if that’s not enough motivation for you, how does winning up to 10,000 clams sound? We’re looking for search heroes in the categories of Best Enhanced Result, Best Infobar, Most Innovative Use of Structured Data, Best Data Service, and Grand Prize (best over all categories). More on the SearchMonkey Challenge here.

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

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.