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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Would you believe it was only 55 years ago today that we first understood how genes were passed from generation to generation? Can you say double helix? After pausing to honor the granddaddies of molecular biology, check out what was in our deoxyribose nucleic acid this week.

• Would you like to touch our SearchMonkey?: If you’re a developer or site owner clamoring for a chance to monkey with enhanced Yahoo! search results, sign up for a developer preview of SearchMonkey or mark your calendar for our May 15th developer launch party. It’s our first step toward a totally new open Yahoo! strategy. Buh bye, links and abstracts. Hello, rich results with data like images, deep links, ratings, reviews, etc.!
• Circle of refinement: Yahoo! Local just made narrowing search results vastly easier with that rockstar of geometry: the circle. Looking for a greasy spoon for breakfast, but want one close to the ocean? Click “expand map” on your search query results and move that circle around to whatever ‘hood you’re looking for and make the radius bigger or smaller. As you move the circle, the business results automatically update. Brings new meaning to search radius. More here.
• Share your Flickr love: See something on Flickr and just can’t contain yourself? In this world of instant gratification, it’s now easier than ever to share photos, videos, sets, and groups with Flickr’s simple new “share this” button. Everpresent on the upper right side, it beckons you to email, link to, blog about, or get the HTML code to embed pictures and videos. What’s more, it will auto-complete screen names of your contacts as you type. All the more easy to spread the love. More here.
• Ain’t nothin’ better than free: You’re about to toss your old bottle cap collection when you realize there just might be a 10-year-old aching for a Nehi Red to complete his. That’s when you go check out our “Free is Good” microsite, launched in honor of Earth Day. It’s based on the old “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” adage and it’s there to help you find reuse groups in your neck of the woods. In addition to the warm feeling you’ll get inside from getting cool stuff and keeping other stuff out of landfills, you’ll have a shot at scoring eco-friendly prizes like a Smart car, a trek to a national park, a trip to an eco-resort, a home energy audit, local organic food or public transit for a year, or even free toilet paper (hey, who doesn’t need that?). Get thee green!
• Gimme your digits: You’ll never have to ask that again with the new MyBlogLog feature that lets you instantly add your MyBlogLog contacts and other members to your address book. They’ve rolled out one-click access to vCards (for Outlook, Thunderbird, Address Book on Macs, etc.) and hCards (for you more sophisticated microformats fan). Your info will reflect whatever you specified in your privacy settings. There’s nothing quite like portable data. More here.

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Today marks a 102-year anniversary that fortunately very few people remember… when a 7.9 tremblor rattled streets, buildings, and teeth in San Francisco. After comfortably denying it could ever happen again, check out our earth-shaking updates:

• Your city is big time now: Ever been frustrated that your city doesn’t rank when it comes to online city guides? Seeth no more. Whether you live in Kailua, Kinnelon, Killingworth or Kennebunkport (or any large metropolis around the world, for that matter), you’ll find your city in the new Yahoo! Our City. It dynamically scrapes what’s available on the Net — Flickr photos, news, events, weather, videos, blogs, maps — and melds them together in a single comprehensive snapshot. The fruit of a Yahoo! India Hack Day winner, it’s a city guide of the people, by the people, and for the people. For every citizen around the world. More here and on their blog.
• MyBlogLog Tweets:The team at MyBlogLog is embracing the 140-character Web. They’ve launched their own Twitter account to help keep you up to speed on goings on, as well as make it easy for you to lob over comments and quick questions. So go follow MyBlogLog and don’t skip a beat. More here.
• Even hackers have taste: If you’ve spent time at the Yahoo! Developer Network in the past, you might have noticed its radical face lift. Not only does it have a clean new 21st-century look (we didn’t want to rush anything), it now has “improved navigation and information architecture built to meet the needs of the lazy and impatient developers” among you (their words, not mine). You’ll also find more timely content, with four content tabs about the latest and greatest at all times. There’s also an Upcoming events stream for rubbing elbows with Tech Yahoos and lots of YDN Theater goodness. We even used our own popular YUI library components to rebuild the site. It’s all about eating dog food around here.

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It’s been 45 years since The Rock was designated to hold bad guys the likes of Al Capone and “Machine Gun” Kelly. Gangsta cred or not, there’s no escaping this week’s updates:

• Mobile March Madness: Now you can keep tabs on all the latest college hoops action wherever and whenever from your mobile phone with three new tools. You can get up-to-the minute news, scores, schedules and images on the dedicated mobile NCAA page, the new Men’s College Hoops mobile widget (you’ll need Yahoo! Go 3.0), and specially-configured Yahoo! oneSearch results, with specialized men’s college basketball content from Yahoo! Sports and Rivals.com. No need to be tied to your computer screen to keep score. More here.
• Team spirit: We’ve got more Audibles to cheer your NCAA team on Yahoo! Messenger. Whether it’s to jeer at your friends’ alma mater or boo a bad play, we’ve got Audibles (like a referee calling an offensive foul) and new avatar gear (find jerseys from more than 25 schools) to show your team pride. Make sure you’re using Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 or 9.0 beta to get your spirit on.
• Staying on topic: You may have heard about the “New with Me” profile page on MyBlogLog that pulls together all your activity across the Internet and shows people what you’re up to (like a feed of all your updates and your friends’ updates). We’ve just added a new Tags page that combs through your “New with Me” page into relevant pages called Topics. What does this mean? Not only can you see an aggregation of your friends’ Internet whereabouts in one place, now you can find what your MyBlogLog community is saying, doing, thinking about any topic you find interesting quick and easy. BTW: Find out what the Easter chatter is here.

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Ride the Fire Eagle, grab some afternoon delight…

March is a great month to get your geek on. Tech conferences flourish: O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference, now in its seventh year, heralds springtime in San Diego. South by Southwest (SXSW), Austin’s annual music, multimedia, and film extravaganza tests the stamina, sociability, and interaction skills of thousands web developers and designers from all over the world, with more than a week of panels, presentations, and parties.

Last Wednesday at ETech, Tom Coates from Yahoo!’s Brickhouse invited participants to “ride the Fire Eagle.” His keynote announced the developer’s beta launch of Fire Eagle, “a secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy.” Fire Eagle invitation cards flew out of the booth and into the hands of hundreds of developers attending the event.

O’Reilly Media also hosted Graphing Social Patterns (GSP), a new conference held in conjunction with ETech, focused on the business and technology of social platforms. Yahoo! Developer Network participated in ETech and GSP as a gold sponsor. Following Charlene Li’s Monday morning keynote on the Future of Social Networks (you can view her presentation deck here), MyBlogLog product guy Ian Kennedy announced the opening of MyBlogLog’s APIs.

MyBlogLog is a Yahoo! service that powers the “Recent Readers” badge, which you’ll find on our sidebar and all across the blogosphere. MyBlogLog is a tool that lets people learn about their community of readers, and gather and display pointers to all the online social services they use. By opening its APIs, MyBlogLog gives developers tools to create interesting new social mashups and news ways to visualize online communities and social activity data.

Speaking of social activity streams: dozens of Yahoos participated as speakers, panelists, booth staffers, and attendees at ETech, GSP, and South by Southwest. Take a peek at some highlights of our ETech presence, captured by Ricky Montalvo for the Yahoo! Developer Network theater:

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Developer Network

Photo from James Duncan Davidson

Eat my shorts and do have a cow in honor of Matt Groening’s 54th birthday. After you’ve done your best “doh,” take a look through our futurama updates.

• Popcorn not included: We’ve added one more reason for you to cozy up with your sweetie. Add the My Netflix module to your My Yahoo! page and get instant access into your Netflix account without leaving your page. You can see what the “Top Rentals” are or what’s new and hot for a special evening. Or get a status update on what movies are on their way to your home. Read more here.
• New and improved: Yahoo! Video look a little different to you? Not to worry, you’re not going crazy. We’ve made some changes to make the site the one-stop shop for all video on Yahoo!, whether it’s news, sports, movies or music. You now get a wider and cinematastic (16:9 player view in fact) viewing experience, bigger files so you can upload higher quality files (up to 150 megabytes), and also curate your own video experience beyond embedding your own individual videos to your blog or site. There’s more, read about it here.
• Putting the My in MyBlogLog: Just think, how cool it would be to personalize your site with your MyBlogLog community. With the new MyBlogLog plugin you can now instantly display members from your MyBlogLog community on your site. The plugin lets you display a widget of your most active MyBlogLog members, helps you to manage a members’ list page, and view a detailed members profile page. Just think of all the social bookmarking opportunities! One caveat, the plugins only work if you’ve already got a Yahoo! API key, but not to fret if you don’t. You can apply for the beta at developer.yahoo.com/mybloglog . Check out what else the team’s brewing here.

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