Today, of course, is the eighth anniversary of the September 11th attacks in NYC, the Pentagon, and rural Pennsylvania. To ensure we never forget, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum just put out a call for people from around the globe to “Make History” with their images, videos, and stories as a permanent digital archive. Here’s how we made history this week:

• F-F-Fantastic phone apps: For the millions of you with touch-screen phones, you can now download some of Yahoo!’s most popular services. Call them the Three F’s: Finance, Flickr and Fantasy Football (or is that four Fs?). With interactivity reminiscent of their Web-based counterparts, these apps let you access our services on the go from an iPhone, iPod touch or select Blackberry models (including Bold, Tour and 8900 series). For now, Finance and Fantasy Football users can download them in the U.S. and Canada, while the Flickr app is also available in the UK, France, Hong Kong, and Singapore. For a deeper dive, check out our post earlier this week.
• Inviting apps & jumbo files: The new and improved Yahoo! Mail just debuted three new apps that turn your inbox into even more of a productivity hub. Head over to that handy Applications box and you’ll notice new apps from Evite and pingg — two options for sending and managing invitations. They sensibly integrate with tools like Yahoo! Calendar, Yahoo! Address Book and Yahoo! Maps to take the stress out of party-planning (and -going). And the new Attach Large Files app, courtesy of the folks at drop.io, lets you upload and share files up to 100MB. You can also collaborate by commenting on files, leaving a voicemail for more context or dialing in to a conference call for a real-time powwow. Read more here.
• Neighbors helping neighbors: Let’s say that waffle iron you plugged in blew your kitchen fuse and it’s been a blue moon since you last called an electrician. Where do you turn? The best tips are often from the people you bump into every day in your neighborhood. And we’ve just made it easier to get their word-of-mouth recommendations. Yahoo! Neighbors, a new feature on Yahoo! Local, lets you get answers to everyday problems. Use it to find local services or post questions and tips for the community. For a taste, check out this thread from some users in Dallas in search of a driving school.
• New souped-up Messenger for Mac: For all you Mac users, there’s a new beta version of Messenger available for download. Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 comes with a bunch of new bug fixes to help it run more smoothly. You’ll also get the Messenger Insider window that’s available on Windows versions, giving you a daily snapshot of what’s happening on Yahoo! and around the world. Want to take it for a test drive? Download it here and read more here.

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Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

It’s National Frozen Foods Day! A time to honor the cryogenic wizardry that prolongs the life and freshness of pizzas, peas, breakfast sausage, Hungry Man dinners, ice cream, and, of course, snowballs. Honorable mention goes to the microwave today. Here’s what we nuked up this week:

• Video free for all: Flickr made several video headlines on Monday. First, they granted free video uploads to all users (hooray!). Then they introduced HD video uploads for Pro users (yahooo!), bringing the magical and glorious world of crisp, aperture-rich high-definition video to the viewing masses on Flickr. And, finally, they introduced Flickr Clock, a unique new toy that lets you explore videos taken across the Flickrverse by time of day. Oh! And unrelated to video, free Flickr users are no longer relegated to organizing photos into just three sets — let’s hear it for unlimited sets for your 200 most recent photos.
• In the loop on Mail: If you noticed something different when you logged into Yahoo! Mail, that’s because the team has been sprucing up the page with more new social features. As we said in December, we’re working on bringing you a “smarter inbox.” Initially, you could see your friends’ Yahoo!-related updates (i.e., stories they’ve buzzed on Yahoo! Buzz, hotels rated on Yahoo! Travel, etc.). But now you can see their updates from across the web — sites like YouTube, Blogger, Yelp, Picasa, and more. And there are many more Yahoo! sites now live, including Yahoo! Sports and Flickr. More here.
• Inquisitive iPhone: If you own an iPhone in the U.S., I suggest you run — don’t walk — to the App Store and download yourself a copy of the new Inquisitor app. This new mobile version of Inquisitor makes searching on your iPhone a breeze by autocompleting keywords and making search suggestions, so you can spend less time typing and more time finding. Here’s the buzz on Twitter. Obama’s not your president? Sit tight — it’s coming to your world soon.
• That’s my Mac calling: If you’re a Mac head and like calling your friends via Yahoo! Messenger, listen up. One of our engineers has written a plugin that lets you automatically dial a friend from within your Mac Address Book. Just install the script, open a friend’s contact card, right-click on the phone number, select “Call with Yahoo! Messenger,” and start gabbing away. Make sure you have Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 Beta 4. More here.

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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.

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What’s with August 15th and creature hoaxes? Thirty one years, a SETI scientist in search of extraterrestrial life received a radio signal from deep space… but he could never detect it again. Today, two guys claim to be in possession of a bona fide Bigfoot carcass… but sounds like the DNA sample was part human but mostly possum. Ok, no joke, here’s what we tracked down this week:

• Olympic redux: If you missed last night’s one-two punch from the American gymnastics team (probably because you were getting eight hours of sleep as I piled on more Olympics-induced sleep deprivation), Yahoo! Search has come up with a tool that lets you get photo highlights of the biggest moments of the Games. Just go to Yahoo! Image Search, type “Olympics” plus an athlete’s name or a sport, and you’ll get an up-to-date photo carousel of images from Yahoo! Sports’ coverage. You can just toggle through the various images without leaving the page. So you can stay on top of the Games without bags under your eyes. More here.
• Surfing Safari: If you’re a Machead and you want the speed and helping hand of Yahoo! Search from your browser toolbar, go install the Inquisitor plug-in for Safari. After acquiring the software in May, we’ve been quietly sprucing it up with technology from Yahoo! Search BOSS to make searching faster. We also gave it a design and interface facelift. And finally, we sent it to a few Berlitz courses, and now it speaks eight new languages — Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German. Smarter, faster, and multilingual. Not bad for a few months. More here.
• Fire Eagle soars: The Web started out not really caring where you were. Now it seems like more and more services have found geographic religion. If only you had a digital switchboard that could update all of them with wherever you are — from state to neighborhood to street corner. Enter Fire Eagle, our new application for sharing, updating and managing your location information with Web services and mobile products. It also lets developers add location services to their applications. No more wandering clueless in a new city. No more missing out on a friend who’s just a block away. Check out some of the 50+ applications already running on Fire Eagle. More here.

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You silently grieve every time you open your drawer — all those lonely socks whose mates went missing on their last trip to the laundry room. Well, today is Lost Sock Memorial Day. A time to mourn, eulogize… and then face the music and admit those tootsie warmers ain’t never coming back. After you’re done purging, here’s what we got out of our system this week:

• Safe from harm: Like the real world, the Web can have some crummy neighborhoods. That’s why we launched SearchScan, a new safety feature built into Yahoo! Search, courtesy of the security experts at McAfee. No more unwittingly clicking on dangerous links that might download spyware, malware, or other nefarious wares. You’ll get a warning label next to questionable web sites, including those that might have dubious email practices that include spammy missives in your inbox. We just don’t want you going to the wrong side of the street. More here.
• Your every move: Those cats at MyBlogLog are making it easier to keep tabs on what your community of contacts is up to. They’ve just added Yahoo! Answers, Google Reader, and the cool new video startup Seesmic to the nearly 50 popular services you can track in your “New With Me” lifestream. Make a move? MyBlogLog will post that event for all to see. More here. They also just cooked up an Add Services Shortcut (with a most unfortunate acronym) that assumes that you use the same screenname at multiple sites. Their script monkeys scan the services for your ID and let you add them with a single click.
• Seeing is believing: You’re a visual person. You like pretty pictures. Then Glue Pages Beta is for you. Over across the Big Pond, the Yahoo! India Search team just launched a new concept for search that sticks text, images, and video content together into a single results page. Available for select terms across categories like health, sports, entertainment, travel, technology, and finance, it gives you various takes on a given topic. For example, “Barak Obama” brings back results on Wikipedia, Yahoo! News, Memeorandum.com, videos, images, blogs, and RSS feeds for the most active political news sources. More here.
• Searchin’ Safari: This isn’t so much product news, as just good news… for Mac users. We just acquired Inquisitor, which created a Safari browser plug-in that auto-completes search queries and pops up results along with ideas to help refine. It’s not unlike our own Search Assist feature. Download it here and keep your eyes peeled for future innovations.

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