As the place where over 500 million people visit every month, Yahoo!’s goal is to bring together social experiences from across the web, and provide one place for people to access information and stay in touch with the people they care about most.

Yahoo!’s integration of Facebook Connect will provide you with richer experiences across the Yahoo! products you use every day, such as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Sports.  In the future, you’ll be able to choose where you want to update your status message – from destinations across Yahoo! – or directly on Facebook.

We are doing this as part of our commitment to deliver more personally relevant Internet experiences, so watch for more details in the New Year!

Jim Stoneham, VP of Communities for Yahoo!

Yahoo!’s tech gurus have just returned from quite the trip! Last week, the team packed their bags and headed to Bucharest, Romania to host Yahoo!’s 14th Open Hack. It was a huge hit with over 350 hackers and developers from 19 countries around Europe joining us for a day of technical sessions and presentations, followed by an all-night 24-hour hackathon.

Over the course of the weekend, hackers consumed..

1090 cans of Red Bull
115 liters of Pepsi
55 lbs of coffee

..to keep them energized and awake throughout the hackathon  event.

After a day and a half of crazy cramming and hacking (and piles of pizza!), hacks were judged on their originality and technical excellence by a panel of judges that included Yahoo!’s Chief Technology Officer, Raymie Stata; Todd Hay, who heads up the Yahoo! Developer Network, as well as notables from Romania’s tech community. Hackers then joined Raymie Stata for a keynote followed by the Open Hack Europe 2011 recognition ceremony.

Hack days are a great way to encourage innovation and share ideas across the developer community and this year’s event didn’t let us down – the buzz around Yahoo! products and APIs was huge!

Judgesrated the following as the top hacks:

TheBatMail
Best Product Enhancement
TheBatMail application integrates directly into Yahoo! Mail and features threaded discussions, social discovery and email editing.

Map of Deforested Areas in Romania
Hack for Social Good
Map of Deforested Areas in Romania works with satellite images to identify deforestation in Romania and can be used by the general public and NGOs to monitor and compile deforested areas in the country.

Take a Hike
Best Yahoo! Search BOSS Hack
Take a Hike tracks the popularity of political parties and current politicians, showing stats and other useful information about the local political climate.

Tourist Guide
Best Local Hack
Tourist Guide finds the most popular places for tourists to visit using the number of uploaded pictures on Flickr and Panoramio and check-ins with Foursquare and Gowalla.

The Yahoo Farm – “Cloud Data in Your Bedroom“
Hacker’s Choice
This crafty hardware hack gathers data about your local weather, incoming Yahoo! Mail, and Messenger buddies via Yahoo! APIs and presents it as ascale model diorama of a country farm, complete with yodeling sheep and a working windmill.

YMotion
Best Mashup
Ymotion helps you get an idea about the mood of your audience at a presentation or a popular tourist location by using facial expression recognition techniques.

Yahoo Social Programming
Best Messenger Hack
Yahoo! Social Programming is an Eclipse plug-in based on the Yahoo Messenger API that enables programmers around the world to share their code in real-time.

Top Hacker
Alexandru Badiu was also named Best in Show for contributing three hacks to the event (Playlist-O-Matic, Take a Hike and Quick Info), which is quite an accomplishment in itself and even more so considering the time constraint!

We’re all beat from the festivities, but thrilled that we got to meet such inspiring new members of our developer community.  We are already looking forward to our next Open Hack event, taking place in Bangalore in July – we hope to see you there!

Check out the @openhackday Twitter handle or the Facebook and Flickr sites for more buzz around the event.

• Everything in one place: Imagine being able to link practically any kind of Web content to your phone (think news feeds, web sites, videos, images, emails, search queries). Yahoo! onePlace works like a smart mobile bookmarking tool and brings all your favorite content in one place with one click. You organize it how you want it and it dynamically updates itself (like flight status). It’s also designed to link to your personalized content on the Yahoo! network (My Yahoo!, Flickr, del.icio.us) and other sites too (like Yelp and Digg). One caveat: it’s coming out in Q2 2008. So keep those fingers ready!
• Test-drive worthy: Yahoo! Maps just got juiced up with new neighborhood data, expanded worldwide coverage (especially throughout Eastern Europe), and some new stylistic improvements like lighter map tiles and hybrid road colors. The coolest part is the new lower zoom levels and view into 12,000 new neighborhoods like the “Lower East Side” in New York. We’ve even added new “points of interest” info like schools, rest areas, and ski resorts. There’s more to come, so stay tuned and read more here.
• All things digital: If you’re addicted to Kara Swisher’s daily “BoomTown” chatter, we’ve got the perfect addition to your My Yahoo! page. The new “All Things Digital” module lets you stay on top of the Valley tidbits with the latest tech commentary and analysis from Kara, Walt Mossberg, and John Paczkowski. Add it here.
• The eagle has landed: Well, for developers that is. For Web, mobile, and desktop developers that haven’t yet gotten wind of the news, Fire Eagle (our new open location-based platform) has beta launched so you can build cool applications that hone in on a user’s location. How does it work? Users share their location (in a secure and safe way) so that you can create cool ways for them to discover the world around them. It’s invite-only, so make sure to ask for an invitation and keep tabs on the team’s updates.

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