March is here, which means college basketball tournament time, one of my favorite times of the year, when even the mildest of fans start keeping up with every single game. When the Virginia Techs and the Daytons are crossing their fingers every single week that they stay inside that coveted bubble. When Facebook and Twitter status updates explode every time a top-10 team gets stunned or a star player makes an amazing dunk.

Facebook and Twitter—those sure weren’t around when I was playing in the Championship game 20 years ago against Duke. I’ll never forget the thrill of that victory, all the memories from the entire season, playing alongside Stacey Augmon and Larry Johnson—broken jaw and all.

I’m not on the court anymore, but that’s one of the beautiful things about the NCAA Championship Tournament: With every correct pick, every upset we call, every favorite team that advances, we (the fans) get to share in the thrill. One million dollars certainly doesn’t hurt, either—which is what Yahoo! is offering one lucky fan for submitting the perfect bracket. No perfect bracket in the end? No problem. The best bracket in the KFC- sponsored Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick ‘em contest wins $10,000 (just ask Michael Lemon—he’s been enjoying his winnings from last year), and there’s even a second-chance contest from TIAA-CREF for the majority of us that must reluctantly accept our busted brackets.

Starting today, on-the-go fans will have access to a great new mobile experience for staying on top of their bracket selections. Yahoo! has created a mobile site where fans can play the Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick’em game right on their mobile device at m.yahoo.com/tourneypickem. In addition, they’ll be able to get live scoring, game stats, updated schedules, news, and expert analysis from the Yahoo! Sports editorial team.

And it’s even easier these days to get your friends involved (and we all know the real satisfaction comes in beating that one friend who is so sure he’s going win) with Facebook and Twitter integration. Plus, you can be a die-hard fan without having to invest all the time and research. Yahoo!’s Bracket Wizard and Scenario Generator help fans with those quick decisions and allow them to see at a glance which teams to cheer for along the way to ensure that big W.

One of the perks of being a member of the Yahoo! Sports team is that I get to pitch in and offer my best (and presumably spot-on) advice to the masses. For those last-minute updates, fans can tune in to Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Bracket Live, a live and interactive web-show from the folks who brought you the Emmy®–nominated Yahoo! Fantasy Football Live. Tune in on March 17 as Jason King, Brad Evans, Larry Beil and I give you a final rundown on all the immediate updates affecting your teams. Viewers can even send us their bracket, and there’s a chance we’ll help you out with it on our show.

I know you guys are as excited about the next few weeks as I am. If you haven’t already, you better get in the game soon. Tip-off is only 8 days away, and it can’t get here soon enough!

-Greg Anthony, Yahoo! Sports College Basketball Analyst

“Hollywood’s Biggest Night” is just around the corner and Yahoo! is ready to take you down the red carpet and get you through the evening with up-to-the-minute information and all the news, photos, and juicy gossip you can handle.The 82^nd Academy Awards are at 8 ET / 5 PT Sunday, March 7, 2010 at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood and will be hosted by Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.  While the show will be broadcast on ABC, Yahoo! once again is THE place where you can weigh in on all things Oscar, from the fashion faux pas to the surprise winners and the heartfelt speeches.

We’ve dedicated an entire section of Yahoo! Movies to this year’s awards show with the idea that Yahoo!’s Coverage of the Oscars starts with you! Let your voice be heard and make sure to cast a vote in our poll: “What do you want to see most when you watch the Oscars?” As of right now, 43% of you want to see who wins the big awards. You can also weigh in on who you think deserves to win Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director.

Interested in seeing what the stars are wearing? We’ve got you covered with our Oscars Photo galleries including fashion photos from the red carpet, insider photos from the before and after parties, photos of the nominees, and photos from the many events taking place Sunday.

We also have a Featured Videos section, a News section, and an ongoing Oscars Blog.

Coverage of the 82^nd Annual Academy Awards is already underway with both OMG! and Yahoo! News feeding into the Oscars frenzy.

Want to be the best informed on this year’s likely winners and losers? We’ve broken down the Academy Awards by category to help you get a leg up on your friends in picking who will win Oscar gold, in How To Win Your Oscars Pool.

Find out why Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Ali G/Borat/Brüno) went from being a presenter to sitting the award show out and watching from home!

Want an expert’s opinion? Who’s more suited to give Oscar picks than OUR favorite Oscar–namely Oscar the Grouch? Sesame Street’s seminal crab-apple took a few minutes to answer some questions on who he thinks the winners will be on Sunday. Check out Oscar the Grouch’s Oscar Picks.

Criticisms of this year’s hottest movies and highest contenders are outlined in Yahoo! News’ Controversies big and small dog Oscars contenders. Find out why there’s been outrage over Sigourney Weaver’s role in Avatar.

Red-carpet style predictions and fashion alerts are revealed in OMG!’s Glam Slam: Oscar Style!

Have your own opinion on the big winners and major upsets? Want to weigh in on some of the fashion wins and fails? Then we invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

On Facebook, be sure to check out the Yahoo! Movies fan page (Yahoo! Movies) where you can write captions to photos of your favorite celebs. We’ll be uploading fashion photos of the movie stars from the red carpet, and we’re asking you to submit your most witty captions via comment.

On Twitter, follow @YahooMovies for real-time info on Academy winners. Follow @YahooOMG for updates on fashion from the red carpet. Follow @YodelingMamas for a Mom-blogger’s point of view on the evening. And of course follow @Yahoo for an overall perspective.

See you on the red carpet–and may the best man, woman and picture win!

We all know that the Web makes the world a much smaller place, and we have some great news to share today that will make your Web world smaller and easier, while at the same time expanding your social world online! We’re partnering with Twitter to integrate their real-time social experience into our global network.

What does this mean for you? Very soon, you will be able to see your Twitter feed on Yahoo! just as easily as you use Yahoo! to consume all of the other great content you love from across the Web. Through today’s partnership, along with our recently announced Facebook relationship, Yahoo! is giving your online social life wings to help you stay in touch with the people and things you care about most across the Web. It’s part of our strategy to ensure that Yahoo! delivers the people and things that matter most to you!

Want to see your friends’ latest Twitter posts? Or update your Twitter feed with stories and content from Yahoo!? Or check out trending topics and public updates? You no longer need to stop what you’re doing to see what’s going on with your Twitterverse — you’ll be able to do it all from Yahoo!.

As part of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) to make the Web more open and relevant, we’re helping you zero in on what’s important to you:

• Coming Soon: Read your personal Twitter feeds directly from Yahoo!’s many products and properties, including the homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and others — anywhere you can see Yahoo! Updates across our network.
• Coming Soon: Update your Twitter status and share content from Yahoo! in your Twitter stream — we’ve made it even easier to share what’s going on with your friends and followers on Yahoo! and Twitter.
• Coming Soon: Whenever you produce social actions on any website (like comments on articles, ratings, buzzes on Yahoo! Buzz) that you’ve allowed to appear on Yahoo! Updates, those actions can also be shared automatically with your friends on Twitter. (Pssst: Publishers and developers interested in learning more about Yahoo! Updates, including publishing directly into it or using Yahoo! Buzz or the Yahoo! Application Platform as ways of driving social traffic to your site, look here , here and here.
• Coming Soon: Yahoo! media properties like News, Finance, Entertainment, and Sports will include real-time public Twitter updates, allowing you to get a quick pulse-check on topics, trending and otherwise.
• Available Today: Yahoo! Search users will immediately see real-time Twitter results starting today.

The real-time Search integration is available immediately, with other features of the integration to be launched later this year. Go on, give it a test flight: Go to Yahoo! Search to check out how we just made your Web world smaller, yet larger at the same time.

Bryan Lamkin
SVP, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo!

We have good news to share with everyone who uses Yahoo! and Facebook – in the first half of 2010 we will open the door between two of the Internet’s largest online communities. You will be able to see your Facebook friends’ activities on Yahoo! and share Yahoo! content – ratings, photos, article comments, and more – directly on your Facebook stream.  We’re doing this by deeply integrating a service called Facebook Connect across Yahoo!  properties worldwide, which we announced today.

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!

Six years ago today, some unruly trees in Ohio plunged 55 million people into darkness during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. While inconvenient, it forced people out of high-rise apartments, neighbors bonded, guitars went acoustic, candles were lit, and there might even be a higher than average number of kindergartners this year. Here are our new beginnings from this week:

• Cheapskates rule: There’s nothing like nuked portfolios and pink slips to make couponing de rigueur. This recession has spawned a generation of proud penny pinchers who enjoy the hunt for great bargains, and the refreshed Yahoo! Deals makes that even more sporting fun. In addition to daily deals, weekly electronic circulars, and online coupons from major retailers, you can now find great local bargains with coupons for groceries and neighborhood stores. You can even share your dollar-saving discoveries through social tools like Twitter, Facebook, Digg and Delicious. Get your save on. More here.
• Trash talking mayors: Politics and fantasies should rarely mix. But mayors from 11 big football cities are letting their imaginations run wild as they pick their teams for the Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football Mayoral Face-Off. From San Francisco to Oakland, Green Bay to Buffalo, mayors are squaring off to see who can assemble the winning team. What’s in it for them? A check for $15,000 to benefit their favorite local sports charity. What’s more, the city with the most votes from football fans scores another $15,000. So go hit the polls now. More here.
• Measure your mojo: If you know how to retweet your @replies with a hashtag, you’re on Twitter. But do you know what kind of Twitter user you are? In celebration of the launch of our new Yahoo! Homepage, we’ve launched Know Your Mojo with a sophisticated pipe thingy that analyzes your account and spits out your social mojo. If you’re a Crowd Pleaser, you’re into hashtags. If you’re a BFF, you’re big into @replies. If you’re a Wall Flower, you seem to have forgotten how to type. We’ll also recommend what websites you should add to your own Yahoo! homepage to help feed your mojo. We’re a Concierge. More here.
• You’re two-faced: Speaking of customizing your Yahoo! Homepage, we’ve developed a Facebook quiz that acknowledges that there’s more than one side to each of us. In our Split Personality quiz, you’ll answer ten multiple-choice questions to determine whether you’re more like Tiger Hilfiger, Galileo Cronkite or Bono Rockefeller (etc.). And then we’ll suggest websites to add to your Yahoo! Homepage that match your dueling passions. What’s your split personality?

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

A lot went into the creation of the new Yahoo! Homepage. Not only did we test it until the cows came home (they’re home now), our developers pulled off significant feats of engineering to make it all work smoothly. While the page is simple, clean, and easy to use, there’s pretty sophisticated technology at work under the covers. Ask an engineer about it and you’ll hear references to things like machine-learned models, Hadoop, separating metadata from markup, giant JSON structures, YUI 3.0, intelligent squid-caching mechanisms, YDBM, MDBM, content optimization knowledge engine, adapter layers, and so on.

If you want to know what all that means, you’ll have to watch this video — now playing on the Yahoo! Homepage, starring just a handful of the many technical talents responsible for our spiffy new homepage.

Fortunately, it’s closed-captioned for the nerd-impaired.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor