As we reflect on what happened in the past year in our lives and in the world, it’s hard to remember each moment and what happened when.

Just this past year, Will and Kate had their magnificent wedding, Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Taylor passed away, Japan was ravaged by a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami, and the list goes on and on.

In my year, I spent time in Northern California, Vancouver, Minneapolis, and Montreal. I went snowboarding and wine tasting, I learned how to make cheese, I attended the Clinton Foundation Concert and saw Bono, Lady Gaga and Usher perform live, and I found out I will become an aunt.

I’ve been thinking about the past year a lot since one of my biggest recent projects has been creating a social extension for Yahoo!’s popular Year In Review program. Year In Review brings together data and insights gleaned from search and news trends and packages it up into top 10 lists, blog posts and videos. Looking at it from a social perspective, we knew we could make the year’s stories even more personal.

We had a lot of ideas, and ultimately created My Year In Review, a Facebook app that brings together the top headlines and images of the year with a user’s own activities in a timeline set to music. The experience is dynamic, beautiful, and emotional, bringing together moments you may have not thought of for month.

Depending on how heavy a Facebook user you are, the more times you play the experience, the more different versions you’ll see, with new pictures, news events, and new timeline images to share.

Don’t let us just tell you about it, though – see your 2011 My Year In Review.

A look back at the year in social at Yahoo!

It has been a big year for social at Yahoo! and I love how the company has embraced social as a medium not just for sharing out content, but for connecting with fans. We celebrated Yahoo! birthdays and milestones, launched new programs, and broke news – and the responses we got were tremendous. It has been encouraging to hear about how long people have used Yahoo!, the events they are most passionate about, and what we mean to them.

With our new focus on social, we also grew our fan base. The Yahoo! Facebook footprint now has more than 23 million fans, the Twitter footprint more than 1.6 million. 2011 was a year for experimenting, learning and encouraging change. We launched Google+ pages, worked with inspiring social influencers, and created a number of impactful social programs, including sweepstakes, games, the Summer Movies Popcorn Giveaway, and programs that supported exclusive live events, like the Twilight premiere and the Clinton Foundation Concert.

The year has been a lot of work, but also very rewarding. Yahoo! has been smart about using social media as a key part of the strategy to extend and enhance its properties and programs, and I’m proud to be a part of the team that created social experiences that touched millions of people.

Thank you and happy New Year!  I can’t wait for what’s in store in 2012.

Francine Kizner
Social Marketing Program Manager @KizzieFK

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series entitled, “In My Own Words,” that gives employees the opportunity to share their own stories about Yahoo!. Feel like yodeling your own? Post your Yahoo! story on your social networks using the hashtag #myYahoostory.

Back in September at Facebook’s f8 conference, we announced the Yahoo! News activity feature, putting your friends front and center in our U.S. Yahoo! News experience. And to our delight, more than 12 million of you have given it a try so far, discovering news stories and sharing what you are reading on Yahoo! with all your Facebook friends. Many of you who love to share your reading activity are young and socially-engaged (no surprise!), and this has quickly impacted the virality of Yahoo!’s content on Facebook, as demonstrated in their recent post about the most shared stories of 2011, showing that 12 of the 40 most shared stories this year came from Yahoo!. In business terms, we’ve seen traffic increase from Facebook to Yahoo! News more than300%.

Based on this success, we’re expanding this nifty Facebook integration to 26 more Yahoo! sites worldwide, including Yahoo! News sites spanning the globe from India to Brazil, Singaporeto Spainand beyond – and we’ve recently added it to US-based entertainment experiences, omg!, Yahoo! TV, Yahoo! Movies, and Yahoo! Games as well. The features are designed to bring a deeply personalized, social news experience to more of the content millions of people come to Yahoo! to read each day.

To build on this increasingly social content experience, an additional social feature, Notifications, has also launched in the US, alerting people to social conversations and other activity on Yahoo! that interest them such as feedback on reviews, responses to comments, and stock alerts. Notifications is found on the top of the page across most pages on Yahoo!, such as Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, omg!, Shine, and Yahoo! Travel.

We think this relatively new mode of discovering, navigating and enjoying news – through the lens of our friends – is reflective of how the Web is evolving today, and we’re excited to help your Yahoo! experience become even more personal for you.

Enjoy!

Mike Kerns, vice president of social and personalization, Yahoo!

Yahoo! Movies and Regal Entertainment Group, the largest movie theater chain in the U.S., have partnered on this promotion where movie-goers can “check in” via Facebook places on their smartphones at any Regal Entertainment Group Theater to get an instant mobile coupon to be redeemed at the concession stand. The voucher is only available by checking-in at popcorn.yahoo.net from any smartphone while inside a Regal location. The promotion will run until August 31, 2011 or until one million bags of popcorn have been redeemed.

According to Yahoo! Movies, the top-viewed summer movie trailer on Yahoo! Movies is Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides with more than 12 million streams since its debut. However, according to a recent poll on Yahoo! Movies, which receives more than 24 million unique visitors per month, movie-goers are most excited to see Harry Potter in action.

Yahoo! Movies Poll: Which action hero are you most excited to see this summer?

• Harry Potter 31%
• Captain America 22%
• Capt. Jack Sparrow 19%
• Green Lantern 14%
• Thor 13%

Yahoo!’s participation in World IPv6 Day will provide real-world data for Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors, and Web companies.  Key learnings from this event will help the industry work together to ensure a smooth transition to IPv6.

Why Is IPv6 Important for the Internet?
Thirty years ago, the Internet was born.  It was commercialized in 1995, and has been steadily growing since. Though it started out as an experiment, it has grown into a critical part of our everyday lives — many people now rely more on the Internet than the telephone or the television.

We are now outgrowing the current IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) design.  We are running out of distinct numerical IP addresses (similar to telephone numbers) to give users and services.  For the long-term health of the Internet, it is time for it to evolve – to “IPv6”. The primary benefit from this new protocol is a much larger address.  We are moving from 32-bit addresses to 128-bit addresses.  With the telephone analogy, this would be like moving from a 10-digit phone number to a 38 digit phone number.

What Will Happen to IPv4?
The current IPv4 protocol will be with us for years to come.  Many websites and ISP may be slow to upgrade to IPv6.  Some customers may find no value in upgrading their home equipment.

ISPs will be forced to continue delivering IPv4 service despite running out of unique IPv4 addresses.  The realistic solution for ISPs will be to have several houses share a single public address (using NAT, or Network Address Translation).  This will be similar to a telephone party line, where several houses shared a single phone line and phone number.  Basic web browsing and basic mail will still work, but several peer-to-peer applications will break.  Examples of this can include voice and video chat, online video gaming, and file sharing.

The future of IPv4 with address sharing has potential to be more vulnerable for security issues, too.  Today, a common method for websites to deal with hackers and abuse is to block the IP address. What happens if they have to block a shared IP address?  If you have to share an IP address with a thousand neighbors and just one of them has a compromised computer doing Bad Stuff, you might find yourself locked out of your email or banking website.

Wide-scale adoption of IPv6 will bypass these nuisances.  IPv6 will ensure that the Internet experience you have today will be preserved (or improved upon!) in the future.

How Will Yahoo! Participate?
Yahoo!’s goal is to motivate organizations across the industry — Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors, and Web companies — to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 address space runs out.   Yahoo! is a leader in addressing the scaling challenges facing the Internet and is committed to lead industry players to support the new protocol.

Most of our “front page” websites (such as Yahoo.com) will be participating in this test.  This includes our international sites.

Only our HTML servers will be dual-stack.  This means that serving our pages will still require IPv4 service for images, scripts, and style sheets.  World IPv6 Day is about enabling IPv6, not about going IPv6-only.   It will be another 2-4 years before one can expect industry-wide support of IPv6-only users.

Destination sites such as mail.yahoo.com, finance.yahoo.com, and others will not be participating in this event; you will still be able to directly visit those sites regardless of what else happens on World IPv6 Day.   API services through the Yahoo! Developer Network will also be unaffected.

How Will This Day Impact You?
Chances are, it won’t.

World IPv6 Day is meant to provide a limited controlled window where any problems can be exposed and corrected.  We expect few problems, since we are at the early stages of IPv6 adoption.  With such a large scale test, however, at least a few problems are expected.

If you are already an IPv6 user, you may see increased latency, due to increased IPv6 traffic.  Circuits and routers may be busier than service providers expected.   You may see connectivity problems not seen previously, due to few web sites today having IPv6 addresses.  In these cases, contact your IPv6 service provider.

One risk category that has been identified involves hosts that have IPv6 enabled, but incorrectly configured.  Industry estimates are that 0.05% of the internet population falls into this category; or 1:2000.

When hosts have IPv6 configured, browsers will prefer IPv6 over IPv4.   This means that when a web site offers both IPv4 and IPv6, the browser will pick IPv6.  When the host is incorrectly configured with a non-functional IPv6 address, this means the browser will spend several seconds (or even minutes) before giving up and trying IPv4.

You can test for this ahead of time by visiting http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ipv6/ , and trying our online test.

If you do have problems on World IPv6 Day..
First, make sure your internet connection is working.  You can visit http://ipv4.yahoo.com to see if you can reach Yahoo! using IPv4.  If that does not work, then ask your ISP for assistance with basic IPv4 internet service.

If http://www.yahoo.com fails, but http://ipv4.yahoo.com works, you are possibly in the “broken configuration” category.  You can try these steps first; they may fix or at least reduce the slow connection behavior.  Some vendors are working diligently to gracefully handle incorrect IPv6 configurations.

• Make sure your home router or wifi router is up to date.
• Make sure your OS is up to date
• Make sure your browser is up to date
• Disable “6to4” (automatic tunnels); they allow a transient temporary form of IPv6 .  They usually don’t have a way for you to complain about their service.  You may find this on your host, or on your router.

Disable “Teredo” if you (or software you use) enabled it.  The default Teredo configuration is safe (and only activates under limited conditions).  Some software changes the Teredo settings to encourage always using Teredo for IPv6 addresses.

If these do not help, and you are unable to correct the IPv6 configuration, then you’ll need to disable IPv6.  You will find instructions at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ipv6/general .  If you do disable IPv6, you’ll need to re-enable it once your service provider offers IPv6 services.

How do I get IPv6?
Check with your internet service provider.  Many are working behind the scenes to get ready for IPv6.   Some have already started commercial deployments.  We anticipate several IPv6 related services being made available in the next 3-12 months from a broad spectrum of service providers.

If you’re comfortable with the idea of setting up IP tunnels, consider looking for “ipv6 tunnel providers” .  Tunnels are a convenient way to get early access to IPv6, and do early testing of your products.  Keep in mind that tunnels may bypass your firewalls; be sure to do a security review and protect yourself adequately.

Adam Bechtel—Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering

Get ready world, the latest version of Yahoo! Mail is moving out of Beta and coming to an inbox near you! This faster, safer, and easier email experience will roll out to you and all of Yahoo! Mail’s 284-million users worldwide, offering fun, engaging and productive features consistent across PC, mobile and tablet devices. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Prioritizes the People and Things that Matter Most: Yahoo! Mail now offers you a more personally relevant experience focused on the people and messages that matter most to you:

• Quickly view and reply to messages, photos and videos: You can instantly respond to messages from Facebook, Yahoo! Groups and webmail providers directly from your inbox with an easy reply bar.
• Conversations that matter: Yahoo! Mail prioritizes messages and contacts that matter most. Now, when you want to compose an IM, SMS or email you will find your most frequent contacts and lists readily available. And, you can store and easily search IM and SMS conversations in addition to emails. Oh and did we mention you can now chat with your Facebook friends right from within Yahoo! Mail?
• Useful applications: You can now track purchases, unsubscribe from unwanted emails or send 100mb (i.e. huge) messages right from your inbox.
• More personalized options: You can choose from many vibrant themes and stationery options to express your personality and customize how you view messages and contacts.

Read more about the new features here.

Designed for Everyone – New Accessibility Features: Yahoo! has made it a priority to make sure the latest version of Yahoo! Mail is even more accessible to people with disabilities. We are proud to say that Yahoo! Mail can be used via a keyboard only or a mouse and leverages context-sensitive instructional text to make it easier for people who use screen readers.  Learn about Yahoo! accessibility initiatives at http://accessibility.yahoo.com

Under the Hood Remodel: This is the largest redesign of Yahoo! Mail in six years, and we rebuilt it with a focus on performance to make it at least 2x faster than previous versions of Yahoo! Mail.  In addition, we upgraded our spam technology to ensure that you aren’t receiving unwanted messages. Did you know that Yahoo! Mail already blocks more than 550 billion spam messages per month? Read more about the improved performance and spam protection here.

Better, Richer, Advertising in Mail: Yahoo! is the market leader in delivering audiences to advertisers, and Yahoo! Mail is no different.  We bring a unique combination of Science, Art and Scale – the Science to understand and target an audience, the Art to engage them within premium content and canvases, and the Scale to reach them in meaningful numbers that drive their business.  Click here to learn more about the advertising features available in Yahoo! Mail.

Nokia Users Get Powered By Yahoo! Mail: All of these great new features and functionality will also be available for Yahoo! Mail’s global partners.  For example, Nokia email and chat services are now “Powered by Yahoo,” offering Nokia users an easier, safer and more social email and chat experience.  Take a look at the Mobile blog to find out more.

The best news:  you don’t have to wait for Yahoo! Mail to come to you. Click here to upgrade and start enjoying, in our humble opinion, the best communications experience on the web (or phone or tablet for that matter)!

Personally yours,

The Yahoo! Mail team

The addition of the IntoNow technology will enable Yahoo! to provide enhanced media experiences and video programming, bolstering its social engagement across the Yahoo! network and on all screens. IntoNow users are able to easily engage with friends around the shows they enjoy most. The application helps people discover new shows, discuss favorites with friends and learn more about them, and provides recommendations for what is currently airing based on their interests and those they are connected to. The application is also integrated with Facebook, Twitter, iTunes and Netflix to enable more sharing and information gathering.

Yahoo!’s royal wedding site will be an extension of Shine From Yahoo!, the leading Website for women’s lifestyle content, and demonstrates Yahoo!’s position as the premier Web destination for landmark global events. And speaking of global – the royal wedding site is localized and live in nine markets outside the US. We invite you to experience the royal wedding through all the features our site offers:

• Guestbook: The Royal Wedding Yahoo! Guestbook gives people a place to offer their marital advice and best wishes to Prince William and Kate Middleton, then share those wishes with users’ social networks.  Even celebrities have left messages for the couple on our guestbook!
• Photo galleries: View photos of the couple’s courtship, Kate Middleton as a child, and much more.
• Articles and blogs: The latest news on the royal wedding, plus articles on the wedding trends, fashion, the royal wedding’s participants and guests, and more.
• Wedding live stream: Watch the royal wedding live by visiting http://royalwedding.yahoo.com on April 29.
• Video:  Yahoo! will feature video from Associated Press, Reuters, and ABC News, along with original video content including a joint ABC News/Yahoo! News Web show called “Wedding Royale.” ABC News will also provide weekly flashback videos of the royal family. During the week of the wedding, Yahoo! will have a crew on the ground in London producing stories on topics people are most interested in.
• Mobile site: Yahoo! allows you to get your Royal Wedding fix anytime, anywhere, by visiting http://m.royalwedding.yahoo.com from your mobile phone.
• A chance to enter the “Live It Up Like Royalty” sweepstakes: By signing the Royal Wedding Yahoo! Guestbook or by “liking” Shine from Yahoo! on Facebook, users will automatically be entered to win a trip to Las Vegas to be treated like a king or queen.

Additionally, Flickr by Yahoo!, one of the world’s best places to post and share photos, features The Official British Monarchy Flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishmonarchy/tags/rw2011/ Join the celebration, the Yahoo! way. Cheerio!

The sweeps will run from March 8th thru April 8th on The Thread’s Facebook page where viewers can enter via a simple entry form. At the end of the month long period, three winners will be selected via random drawing and flown to New York merely weeks later for some ultimate pampering.

TO ENTER: http://www.facebook.com/yahoothethread

The Thread, Yahoo’s premier fashion program, airs weekly on Shine, Yahoo’s online destination geared towards women.

Back in 2007, Yahoo! started noticing spikes in web searches around the previous night’s TV shows. People wanted to know what happened on their favorite shows, what highlights they missed, and who’s hooking up with whom on reality TV shows. With that insight, we set out to develop Primetime in No Time (PiNT), a comical three-minute video show that recaps the previous night’s primetime TV shows. Since then, we’ve witnessed more than 500 million streams of PiNT and, as far as we know, it’s the most watched original video program in Internet history. That’s no funny business.

To celebrate PiNT’s 500 million streams, we’re giving host Frank Nicotero (you might recognize him from “Street Smarts”) a break. Three top web celebrities — Soleil Moon Frye, Michelle Phan, and DeStorm Power — have been tapped to guest co-host episodes of Primetime in No Time between March 28 and March 30.

Starting March 1, the three web celebrities will encourage their fans to “like” Yahoo! on Facebook to be entered to win a trip to Los Angeles to watch them co-host Primetime in No Time.

Soleil Moon Frye starred in the title role of Punky Brewster, a sitcom that aired on NBC and in syndication from 1984 to 1988. Soleil also advises tech startups and owns the organic children’s clothing store Little Seed in Los Angeles.

Michelle Phan is known for creating make-up and beauty tutorials on viral video sites. She is a spokesperson for Lancôme and iQQU Beauty. In November 2010, Michelle reached one million subscribers and became the #1 most subscribed female on YouTube.

DeStorm Power is a singer, songwriter, and video editor. His music has also been featured in national TV and commercial spots such as Pepsi, MTV, VH1, BET, HBO, WinterFresh, KFC, Heinz, Lea and Perrins, Wonderful Pistachios and Showtime at the Apollo.

Watch Primetime in No Time on Yahoo! TV: http://primetime.tv.yahoo.com

Watch the promotional videos of Soleil, Michelle and DeStorm: http://video.yahoo.com/watch/8764556/24316732

Win a trip to LA/ taping of Primetime in No Time:  http://www.facebook.com/yahoo

This week Yahoo! will be opening our network to third-party ID sign-in options with Facebook and Google.  We’re offering people who don’t already have a Yahoo! account (and even those who do) a new way to participate, create, and share their experiences across almost all of Yahoo!. Basically, we’re delivering a great personal experience on Yahoo!, whether you sign in with a Yahoo!, Facebook, or Google ID.

After you sign-in to Yahoo! with your Google or Facebook ID (check out the screen cast to see how easy it is) you’ll be able to start sharing articles, leaving comments, playing Fantasy Sports, personalizing your stock portfolio, rating movies, music and restaurants, and much more.

If you’ve been following Yahoo! you know that we’ve been moving in this direction for a while, innovating with new technologies and open standards (like OpenID) to create a more friendly and personal Web experience. In 2008, we became one of the world’s largest providers of OpenIDs and in October of last year we introduced OpenID log-in with Google on Flickr to make it easier for you to connect with fellow photo enthusiasts and share your photos with the world. We also deepened our commitment to integrating Yahoo! with other social networks when we integrated with Facebook in 2009. It’s our ongoing goal to find new ways to make logging into and engaging with all of the amazing experiences we offer at Yahoo! as effortless as possible.

As a place that over 600 million people visit every month, Yahoo! strives every day to bring you the content, information, tools and meaningful social connections relevant to you from across the Web. It’s our belief that by continuing to open up the Yahoo! network to third-party IDs, we can help more folks join in the fun and create exciting, more personalized and inclusive online experiences.  So sign-in and enjoy the new fast pass to your personal Web on Yahoo!.

The Yodel Editors

Scroll down Santa’s Beard and see what fun surprises Yahoo! has in store for you this holiday season.  From the Gingerbread Man to a polar bear looking for warmth, Santa’s Beard is a haven for all sorts of goodness, including some fun video surprises.  And in the spirit of giving during the holiday season, you can share Santa’s Beard of Joy with friends on Facebook and Twitter!

What will you discover in Santa’s Beard of Joy?  Start exploring now at http://www.beardofjoy.com!

Today’s announcements include the following partnerships and product enhancements:

Share More With a Social Dimension Everywhere on Yahoo!

Yahoo! Messenger Beta – With the new Yahoo! Messenger Beta available today, people can now play social games from publishers like Zynga, ELEX and OMGPOP, share their status across networks, and view, comment on, and “like” updates from Yahoo! Pulse, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter – all from their instant messaging client. Interoperability with Facebook Chat also broadens the group of friends that people can instantly connect and chat with on Yahoo! Messenger. To get the new version of Yahoo! Messenger, visit here and click “Download Now.”

Yahoo! Contributor Network – Announced yesterday, Yahoo!’s new platform enables people to reach an audience of millions by publishing their fresh and authentic content on Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Contributor Network is an evolution of the Associated Content platform and will bring contributions from more than 400,000 writers, photographers, and videographers to the Internet’s largest media destinations, including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, and even the Yahoo! homepage, among many others. For more information, see here.

Zynga – Starting this week, the first phase of integration with Zynga will allow people to launch, play, and share Zynga’s popular games like Mafia Wars and FishVille on Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Games, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Toolbar, and Yahoo! Pulse.

Twitter – Building on Yahoo!’s Facebook integration, people can now also connect their Yahoo! and Twitter accounts globally to see and share Twitter updates on the Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Pulse.

Discover Local Treasures With Yahoo!

Local Offers – Yahoo! is launching its Local Offers program with more than a dozen partners to provide a wide selection of local deals, coupons, and other offers – from nearby spas, restaurants and other local retailers. Currently in limited beta in the U.S., Yahoo!’s Local Offers program will make it easy for millions of people to find the best local deals and savings on Yahoo!. Launch partners include Groupon, LivingSocial, Gilt City, BloomSpot, BuyWithMe, DealOn, Zozi, CrowdSavings, Lifebooker, FreshGuide, Scoop St, Goldstar, HomeRun, Tippr, Coupons.com, and Valpak, with more partners to come.  For more information, please see the press release here.

Local Search Enhancements – Locally relevant “Quick Apps” will empower people to find restaurants they want and take action on things they discover in a more productive Yahoo! Search. Apps launching later this week include a new and improved Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search for visually zeroing in on a street or neighborhood to find local restaurants – now available across connected devices, including PCs, iPhones, and iPads.  Other new apps will enable easy comparisons of local restaurants and let people make reservations through OpenTable right on the Yahoo! Search results page.  For more on these and other Yahoo! Search enhancements launching this week, visit the Yahoo! Search Blog.

All of these new features are built on Yahoo!’s cloud and technology platforms, allowing for in-depth partner integrations and broad distribution across Yahoo!’s consumer products. For example, the integration with Zynga is enabled by the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), which facilitates easy social sharing of game notifications across Yahoo!’s massive audience.

For hundreds of millions of people around the world, email is a critical part of their online communications, connecting them to the people who matter most to them. With that in mind, we are rolling out Yahoo! Mail Beta — a faster, safer, more personally meaningful communication experience – seamlessly across PC, mobile and tablet devices. Here’s what we focused on:

Blazing Speed: We’ve re-architected Yahoo! Mail Beta from the ground up to provide lightning-quick performance. It’s at least twice as fast as previous Yahoo! Mail versions, and significantly faster in key geographies. The Yahoo! Mail team has made several technological advancements to make this happen, from utilizing Yahoo!’s cloud technology to focusing on user-flow optimization. Check out our post on the YDN blog for more on the great technology that’s making this possible.

Reaching Everyone: There are even more ways to share your stories with the people who matter most to you in Yahoo! Mail Beta – no matter what device or what service they use. We’ve added Twitter integration alongside Facebook, as well as richer IM and SMS experieneces, offering you more ways to share directly from your inbox. You can tweet or retweet or send a text message out to friends while pulling together an email.  And you can also easily check out photos and videos from Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube via a new feature that automatically shows slideshows right in your emails when your friends send you links from these sites.

Simple yet Powerful Search: When you’ve got unlimited storage (as you do with with Yahoo Mail) – you have a lot of email!  Our new search interface helps you get the messages you need quickly and easily.  You have the power of sophisticated searches at your fingertips, allowing you to sort and refine by sender, attachment file, date, or folder location.

Stay Safe From Spam: We all know spam is incredibly annoying; it can also be malicious. That’s why we’re proud to be No. 1 in spam protection, blocking over 130 billion spam messages each month. And Yahoo! Mail Beta gives you an even better spam-free mail experience by leveraging the power of Hadoop technology to keep you one step ahead of the spammers.

Take it With You: With this new communications experience, we’re making sure your encounters will be equally fabulous whether you’re emailing from your laptop, iPhone, iPad or Android device. No more relearning how to get things done each time you switch from one connected device to another.

So wherever you are in the world, check out Yahoo! Mail Beta now – a single speedy, simple, safe, and seamless stop for all your online communications.  We’ll be making lots of enhancements and improvements during this beta period, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback.  For more details about Yahoo! Mail Beta, visit the Yahoo! Mail blog, and to find out about related policy updates, check out the Yahoo! Policy blog.

- Kakul Srivastava, vice president of product management, Communications and Communities

Know who interrupted Taylor Swift at the VMAs? Which actress starred in “Salt”? What Eminem’s real name is?

Do we have a game for you!

The just-launched Yahoo! Pop Quiz provides a quick jolt of current questions to answer as you race against the clock for your high score. If you’re savvy enough to earn 1,000 points, you’ll be entered into our daily drawing for four free movie tickets, as well as the grand-prize drawing for a lifetime supply of movie tickets from MovieTickets.com.

How the game works: You have 120 seconds to answer as many multiple-choice questions as you can. You earn 100 points for a correct answer and lose 25 points for a wrong answer. If you don’t know an answer, you can click the “Get a Hint” button for a hint from Yahoo! Search. Play against the clock as many times as you’d like to get on the leaderboard and qualify to enter the daily and grand-prize drawings. Get extra points by sharing with your friends!

All you need to do to play is “like” the Yahoo! Facebook page, and then authorize the game app. There will be new winners every day!

Start testing your pop culture prowess to start winning today: http://yhoo.it/YPopQuiz

So, what are you waiting for?  Get posting. Get your town talking.  You Have a Voice, Use it.

“It’s probably nothing…” they’d say. I wasn’t so sure. So I went to the doctor to make sure.

It wasn’t nothing. It was something. That something was Stage 3 Hodgkins Lymphoma. Cancer.

29 years old. New Job. Travel at a whim. Happy iPhone-toting Geek. Cancer.

I was scared. What did it mean? Was I going to die? Would the iPhone soon have a front facing camera? These are all things a 29 year old happy-go-lucky Geek would think.

I didn’t die. I had to fight, though. And boy, did I fight.

First things first, create a website where people could blame my cancer for anything that bothered them by sending tweets using the hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Check! Second, try to find someone to match $1 for every person who blamed my cancer. Drew Carey? Sure, why not? Check!

It’s been a crazy year and a half. A scary one, an enlightening one, and one that I not only survived and fought back on, but I won. We all did.

Now what? We raised a bunch of awareness, showing that ANYONE can get Cancer at ANY TIME. Not just grandma, not just smokers, ANYONE. Now we just need more cool organizations like LIVESTRONG, which helped me tremendously during my battle and fundraising, to continue the battle. Oh, and another Drew Carey. Check!

Stand Up To Cancer and Yahoo! have teamed up to do something awesome. With ONE Facebook like of their omg! page they will donate ONE dollar to help Stand Up To Cancer fund cancer research. Up to $100k. Easy, huh?

Do it. Let’s show Cancer who’s boss.

-Drew Olanoff, @thatdrew, @drewscancer

Drew’s is just one story – one story with a big impact. But it seems that everyone has been touched by cancer in one way or another. 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women will get cancer in their lifetime. We want to help change those statistics.

Today, Friday, September 10^th your favorite celebs will join forces to raise funds for Stand Up To Cancer. We’re broadcasting the show in a live stream on omg!, starting at 4:30PM Pacific- Watch the live stream.

To help further support this great cause, Yahoo! has pledged $1 for every “like” to the omg! Facebook page up to $100,000.

You can help, too. “Like” the omg! Facebook page, and share the link with your family and friends on Facebook, Twitter, and the other ways you like to share. By doing so not only will you get the latest updates on celebs from the #1 celeb site, you’ll also help fight this deadly disease.

I’m honored to have the opportunity to stand in front of a thousand or so Hadoop technology leaders and developers to talk about how Yahoo! uses Hadoop and the cloud to deliver the right content and the right ads to the right people every second of every day. As the world’s largest user of Hadoop, there’s no doubt in our minds here at Yahoo! that it brings us significant value and is ready for mainstream, enterprise use. In fact, we believe Hadoop will play a big part in the future of the Web.

Everyone knows that the volume of content being published and shared on the Web is growing at a crazy pace. At Yahoo!, we want to help filter out the noise by bringing you the content that’s most personally relevant to you. But doing that requires us to make sense of this BIG data and do it superfast, which would simply be impossible to do if we didn’t have the major data processing power of Hadoop. In the amount of time it takes sunlight to reach the earth (8.3 minutes), Hadoop processes more than 300 million calculations with our data.

And that’s just one example of what Hadoop can do — we’re thankful for the passionate and brilliant Hadoop community and the supportive sponsors of this week’s Summit, all of whom are doing amazing things with this technology as well. Should be a great summit — for those of you who are just dying for more geeky details, follow #hadoopsummit on Twitter, or look for our photos on Flickr.

—Blake Irving, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!

Follow Blake Irving on Twitter: @blakei

*A new study details which parent is more likely to keep a watchful eye on their kids online behavior

*Yahoo! Fantasy Sports-women launching leagues of their own as the boys of summer heat things up

*Yahoo! Connected TV brings TV Widgets to more than 100 countries around the world

About The Yahoo! Digital Media Bureau:

The Yahoo! Digital Media Bureau is a team of Emmy-nominated, multi-platform content creators who innovate and produce original video content, from webisodes to webumentaries. The Yahoo! Digital Media bureau is responsible for the weekly feature, Yahoo! News Bytes, which peels back the layer on everything Yahoo! The Bureau also produces the weekly Yahoo! Trends segment, which focuses on what’s trending in entertainment, pop culture and tech. Yahoo! Trends is distributed on broadcast television and seen throughout the United States.

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and Yahoo! Sports is the #1 destination, reaching more than 20 million users each month-it makes perfect sense to team up with the world’s leading soccer star-David Beckham.  Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced David Beckham would be Yahoo!’s global football ambassador throughout the World Cup. Beckham will be featured in our marketing campaign, provide content for Yahoo!’s World Cup site, tweet and post Yahoo! content on his Facebook page, judge a World Cup Flickr photo contest and more.

And at the conclusion of the Tournament, Yahoo! will host a live global press conference/Q&A with David Beckham in London, which will allow fans from around the world to ask questions of the superstar!  Finally, for several months following World Cup he will be a featured analyst for Yahoo’s football coverage as the world makes the transition back to the regional leagues and competitions.

Yahoo!’s World Cup program is a true global, integrated marketing campaign. It includes live kickoff events in various cities around the world, fun ways to share with your own social networks, a cool online interactive global game to play and a chance to WIN the first-ever Yahoo! Sports Pass (the ultimate prize for sports fans!).

This month, we have also begun launching even more exciting elements of Yahoo!’s campaign.  Our campaign is digitally led with a huge focus on and off the Yahoo! network across all segments with, of course, online activation as one of the major drivers to show the power it has to drive business and build brands.  We will execute a dynamic takeover of the homepage on June 17th illustrating Yahoo! properties in a 3D experience–entertaining, engaging and inviting users to make the web their own with Yahoo!.

Our TV spots, developed for video use on the Web as well, hit screens this week on MTV, VH1 and Comedy Central.  The “Entertainment” spot was also featured on the Glee finale!  Our campaign is cohesive and impactful, communicating one idea-Yahoo! brings Your World together with The World.  We’re continuing to focus on driving deeper engagement through unique demonstrations and trials of our products.

On the cusp of the launching the next release of our campaign, our creative advertising agency, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners has received some very special recognition in the industry. Not only have they been named “Agency of the Decade” by AdweekMedia, but recently, at the CLIO Conference Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein were honored with the CLIO Lifetime Achievement Awards, one of the most prestigious honors in advertising. It recognizes outstanding and ongoing contributions of individuals who lead the industry and gives public recognition of something that we already knew — that we’ve got some of the world’s most talented creative partners helping us continue to build the Yahoo! brand.

Here is a preview of the actual ads that you will start to see in major cities soon:

Look for lots more great stuff to come!

Elisa Steele, EVP & CMO, Yahoo!

About This News Bytes Episode:
Hollywood comes to Silicon Valley as the producers of An Inconvenient Truth unspool their latest documentary at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, Ca. It’s called Countdown to Zero and it focuses on what the film calls the “extinction level threat” posed by nucelar weapons. News Bytes gets an exclusive interview with the movie’s producers, Jeff Skoll and Lawrence Bender. Also, Yahoo! gets social with new Facebook integration. Pamela Woon brings you the latest from inside Yahoo!

About The Yahoo! Digital Media Bureau:
The Yahoo! Digital Media Bureau is a team of Emmy-nominated, multi-platform content creators who innovate and produce original video content, from webisodes to webumentaries. The Yahoo! Digital Media bureau is responsible for the weekly feature, Yahoo! News Bytes, which peels back the layer on everything Yahoo! The Bureau also produces the weekly Yahoo! Trends segment, which focuses on what’s trending in entertainment, pop culture and tech. Yahoo! Trends is distributed on broadcast television and seen throughout the United States.

I started the Feel Your Boobies Foundation in 2004 after I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 33. My goal was simply to remind as many young women as possible to “feel their boobies” because it’s something that saved my life.  We’re now an international non-profit foundation and Yahoo! enables us to spread our message far and wide… and that’s certainly worth a big Yahoo! Yodel.

Feel Your Boobies is 2 employees strong and runs out of a small garage in Central PA.  We are still so tickled pink (of course!) about our business relationship with Yahoo! and are so thankful for the personal support we have received during our growth.

When we say “unexpected and unconventional methods” it means you probably won’t see a “feel your boobies” brochure at your doctor’s office…but you sure as heck might pass the Boobies Bus® on the freeway, or you might be laying at the beach and see an airplane towing a banner with our logo during our Boobies @ the Beach promotion, or, you just might be lucky enough to claim a free car magnet or sticker during one of our Facebook and online promotions.

And that’s where Yahoo! comes into it.  We’re using the Yahoo! Store to give away free ‘feel your boobies’ swag to help remind people about this lifesaving habit with a little humor to boot. We also leverage the Yahoo! Store to accept donations and of course we sell plenty of funky apparel emblazoned with our slogan as well, which is the primary way we fund the “Are You Doing It?”® Reminder Campaign.

The overnight success (literally) of our first free magnet promotion in early 2009 caught us by complete surprise.  In fact, it was a personal phone call from a Yahoo! customer support person who alerted us to the massive volume we were experiencing.  He was not only as excited as we were, but also made himself available over a holiday weekend to provide us with tips to leverage the Yahoo! store to manage the increase in orders more efficiently.  Being a grassroots organization, this spike in traffic was something we dreamed of having, but nonetheless were quickly overwhelmed by the reality of it all.   Fortunately, the free magnet giveaway also triggered a large amount of unexpected donations and merchandise orders that have allowed us to extend the free giveaway program.  We have also decided to incorporate this into our annual campaign because of the exposure it has brought to our organization.

Learn more about our campaign, shop, and signup for our email list at www.feelyourboobies.com.

Leigh Hurst

Founder/President; Feel Your Boobies Foundation

At Yahoo!, we’ve been helping you get your game on with online board games, video games, card games, and more on Yahoo! Games, as well as lots of other fun stuff like fantasy sports competitions — and we just couldn’t just stop there…

Today, we’re announcing a partnership with Zynga the developer of hit social games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Fishville. In the coming months, you’ll be able to play your favorite Zynga games in multiple places across Yahoo! like the homepage, Games, My Yahoo!,  Messenger, and many others sites, using your Yahoo! ID.

So get ready for some exciting and engaging new titles coming to Yahoo! that you can easily play with your friends, family, and fellow gamers and share with your networks across Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga!

For our developer friends,  this means Zynga will be deeply integrating its apps onto the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), Yahoo!’s OpenSocial container, helping to optimize Yahoo!’s distribution channels in ways that other developers can also take advantage of. There will be a set of new open notification channels and other benefits for developers coming to YAP soon!

In the coming months, you will be able to come on over and get your game on with Yahoo! and Zynga!

Cody Simms, senior director, Yahoo! Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN)

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

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!

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!

• 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

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