Can’t live without your 500-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets? Well, thank Eli Whitney for figuring out a way to remove the seeds from cotton 214 years ago. After you finish thinking about the touch, the feel, read on for what we’ve seeded up this week.

• And the nominees are: It’s the final day of nominations for the Yahoo! Video Awards, so get your favorite videos into the line up. We’ve got it all — videos about zombies to Weird Al’s childhood. There are categories for all your interests including Best Indie Music Video, Best Internet Personality, Best Series, and more. And don’t worry, it’s okay to just vote. You may want to wait until Monday after all the nominees have loaded up their videos. Read more here.
• Getting foxy: Through our new friendship with FoxyTunes, we have a brand new version of FoxyTunes 2.0 for IE (freshly beta) to let you control any media player while surfing the web. What’s new? Now you can change the appearance of your FoxyTunes by installing custom skins (we’ve already got 11 skins available) and down the road you’ll be able to create your very own. We’ve even added a FoxyTunes Mini, basically a universal desktop widget that’s a customizable, collapsible, and skinnable version of its big bro. The best part — there’s a timer and alarm clock feature that lets you set your media player to your favorite song. The best part of waking up.
• Retiring in style: As Yahoo! Messenger turns 9.0, we’ve decided to retire our vintage versions (5.5 and 5.6). After April 1, if you’re using version 5.5 or 5.6, you will no longer be able to sign in. We know change is hard, so we’ve got two alternatives to help make it easier. You can download the new Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 or the 9.0 beta, or try our Yahoo! Messenger for the Web. Both options offer better protection from spam, advanced features like voice calling and SMS, and the addition of your friends on Windows Live Messenger. And rest assured, your existing friends will follow up when you make the move! For more info go here and stay dialed into what else the team’s got up their sleeve here.
• Luck of the Irish: Whether you’re Irish or not, green beer and green cheer is just around the corner. So make it official by greening your My Yahoo! page with our new St. Paddy’s themed layout (complete with shamrocks, peeking rainbow, and blue skies). Go here and click on “Seasonal,” then go with the “St. Patrick’s” option.

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Last year, shortly after I assumed the role of Yahoo! Music’s General Manager, we started saying publicly that we were “de-emphasizing” our premium music offering, Yahoo! Music Unlimited. The fact of the matter is that building a great premium music service takes a huge amount of resources and effort, and it was taking energy away from our important main offerings, music.yahoo.com (the Web’s #1 Music destination), music videos, and LAUNCHcast Radio. Around 25 million people visit Yahoo! Music each month. Relatively speaking, a small percentage of those use Yahoo! Music Unlimited, yet an large portion of our resources were being poured into this service. It was clear to us that we needed to make a major strategic shift.

It wasn’t an easy decision. We’re huge fans of Yahoo! Music Unlimited and those customers include many of our most loyal and valuable. We wanted to be sure those users had the best on-demand music experience available on the Internet.

As a result, we’re pleased to announce Rhapsody as our exclusive partner for on-demand music. Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscribers will have a chance to easily take their music catalogs and migrate to Rhapsody. Later this year we will be integrating Rhapsody into music.yahoo.com, so you can continue to use Yahoo! Music for music discovery, news, videos, lyrics, radio, concerts, blogs, and more, and always be a click away from music on-demand. Also, our subscribers will finally have access to the best off-PC experiences such as Rhapsody for TiVo, Sonos, and Control 4 in the living room.

We hope being able to take your Yahoo! Music Unlimited collection to the best subscription service on the Web — the one which works on PC or Mac, Firefox or Safari as well as TiVo, Sonos, etc. — at the Yahoo! Music Unlimited price, is an acceptable outcome. We sincerely apologize for any hassle and thank you for joining us in the Yahoo! Music Unlimited run. It was a wild ride for all of us.

I’m sure a question many people are going to ask is if this means Yahoo! is backing away from online music. Au contraire. It is a major strategy shift but we’re still investing in our music business as evidenced by my second bit of news: our acquisition of FoxyTunes. FoxyTunes is the world’s most popular media toolbar, a plug-in for either Firefox or Internet Explorer. FoxyTunes adds useful functionality to more than 30 media players, including iTunes, Winamp, and Pandora. With FoxyTunes you can easily control your media player from the place you spend most of your time, your Web browser, and jump from a track playing in any media player to lyrics, biography, videos, or more music in a single click. What’s more, the innovative “Signatunes” feature helps you express yourself via your music tastes by automatically inserting signatures into your favorite email program (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail), social network messages (Facebook, MySpace), or blog authoring/commenting platform, based on the currently playing track.

For an excellent tour of FoxyTunes’ far-reaching functionality, please see the screencast on FoxyTunes.com.

While it doesn’t tell the whole story, this news, along with the recent news of our Web Media Player (for a great example of the player in use, check out Aurgasm.us), points the direction for a new Yahoo! Music. We’re focusing on delivering relevant music experiences on the Web and are happy to be partnering with Rhapsody to bring you a simple, integrated, on-demand music experience.

If you’ve never used Rhapsody, check out my best of 2007 playlist on Rhapsody now for free. And be sure to control Rhapsody.com and learn more about each artist with FoxyTunes. ;)

Enjoy,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music