I’m pretty sure you will have heard many times before, but it’s true, in the internet and media world: content is king.

It sounds simple, but what this statement doesn’t do is capture the innovation, the passion and the strives in technology which help Yahoo! deliver the most relevant content to 92 million users in Europe alone by a combining unique technology with human expertise.

First off, you may ask who am I? I am Noelia Fernández Arroyo, VP, Head of Audience in EMEA. I’ve been at Yahoo! for over 13 years. Jerry and the team initially hired me to launch Yahoo! Spain back in 1998. I joined the company because it had the ambition to improve the World through great technology and services, with editorial at the core and you know what, the principle still remains the same today. Yes, I’ve seen changes and have experienced challenges but I firmly believe in Yahoo!’s commitment and passion to create deeply personal experiences on the Web. Yahoo!’s passion, is my passion.

To that point, we have been investing in the right areas and focusing where we can win, and where we are winning! Did you know in Europe’s five largest markets Yahoo! reaches 92 million people, up over 7 million or 9% year on year against a market growth of 2% and we’re ranked number one or two in five categories across Europe: News, Finance, Sport, Flickr and Answers. We are in a unique position where we can leverage our innovation and technology with our European users to deliver compelling content to a mass audience, every day.

We have the best technology combined with talented, global editorial teams who help us turn around events and news that people care about on a global basis. Let me give you an example, the London riots were big news here in Europe, as it was globally. We were seeing a lot of activity on the streets, which was both prolific and sensitive in nature. The flexibility of the global publishing platform allowed our News and Front Page teams to respond quickly to create around the clock coverage and exclusive content in real time and through people’s own eyes. Interestingly, in August, the UK video streams rocketed by 191% on Yahoo! News showing the demand and consumption of rich content in parallel to news stories.

So, how do we do this?

Firstly, we keep investing strongly in our new global content publishing platform. It’s called the Yahoo! Publishing Platform. It’s global but puts power in the hands of local teams here in Europe working for local audiences; it allows us to act much faster to world events and activities and provides a platform for easy integration of rich video content.

So what does the Yahoo! Publishing Platform actually mean for the life of our Editors in Europe?

• In Italy, where Yahoo! Movies is on the Yahoo! Publishing Platform, it took just one hour to create recent coverage of the Cannes Movies Festival which delivered double the performance from the previous year
• We can create and publish original content easily and quickly: in Yahoo! omg! alone we publish over 35 original stories per day unique to Yahoo!
• The Yahoo! Publishing Platform recently launched for Yahoo! Video, Lifestyle and News. A combination of coverage of key events using the new platform led to a 20% increase in Yahoo! News page views in Europe[iv]
• omg from Yahoo! has also launched in Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK
• Yahoo! Movies in Italy launched onto the platform leading to a 60% increase in page views
• So far we have launched 95 products already onto the Yahoo! Publishing Platform

Through our science and technology, we can make informed decisions, based on scientific data rather than predictions and estimations. It allows the editors I work with to get ahead of the game and be first with the right content. This is where C.O.R.E. (Content Optimization and Relevance Engine) comes in, a technology that was developed by Yahoo! Labs a couple of years ago. Sophisticated algorithms and machine learning technology, combined with human expertise allows us to carry out deep personalization to our 674 million users globally and 92 million in Europe.

Did you know?

• Our Editorial team appropriately delivers on average, 35 stories per week day, per market, targeted to our users individual interests based on our own technology
• Yahoo! personalizes 2.2 billion content module experiences on our pages per day
• We show 13 million personalized homepage versions per day and the click through rate in the Yahoo! Magazine on the frontpage has increased by more than 700% in Europe as a result of this technology

So you can see why I am committed, focused and excited to be a Yahoo! and this is just a taste of what we are currently doing here in Europe. I know we have plenty of innovation and new products up our sleeves over the coming months, so watch this space!

Gracias and keep up the purple!

Noelia Fernandez Arroyo
Proud to be a Yahoo!

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.

Yahoo! has always provided our users with an incredible breadth of content curated by an awesome staff of editors. In addition, we personalize the stories you see based on what you read on Yahoo!. Now, we are bringing you the ability to discover great stories through your friends. Just like you do in real life. You can now immerse yourself in the news on Yahoo! surrounded by the comfort of your friends. Let them be your guides on what to read.

Because sharing content isn’t confined to the web, we’re also making it possible for you to share your TV watching activity into Facebook through IntoNow from Yahoo!. This activity will be aggregated on people’s Facebook profile under “Most Watched” and “Most Recently Watched.”  Look out for an updated IntoNow from Yahoo! mobile app with this added functionality in the coming weeks.

Today’s announcement marks a new milestone in Yahoo!’s social strategy to infuse more social and personalized experiences around our premier digital media content.

To join the experience, go here and click on the “Connect with Facebook” button to get started.

And, for a quick look at what this feature looks like before signing up, check out the videos below.

Enjoy and let us know what you think!

- Alexandre Linares
Yahoo! Social and Personalization Team

Ever wish you could have answers and direct access to websites before you complete a query, hit the search button, or go to a search results page? Welcome to Search Direct.

This new feature (currently in beta) taps into Yahoo!’s unique opportunity to combine content and structured data and to provide a rich search experience. Search Direct predicts search results as fast as a person types, character by character, and presents those results dynamically, generating a fast, simple search experience that goes beyond a list of blue links.  Search Direct rolls out in a public beta to Yahoo! users across the U.S. today, and will be available in other Yahoo! products and markets later this year.

With Search Direct, Yahoo! content is combined with information from the Web to provide rich answers, not just links, and to give people the option to immediately engage or continue to a traditional search results page. In this beta release, coverage includes top trending searches, movies, TV, sports teams and players, weather, local, travel, stocks, and shopping categories now available at search.yahoo.com.

• Trending Searches – The moment the cursor hits the search box, top search trends appear and are updated every 10 minutes to display the latest and greatest search trends.
• Search Previews – Search Direct predicts the search term as you type, providing the 10 most likely searches. You can then easily scan each option to see the related top results and find the best match for your needs.
• Direct Answers – For many common searches, Search Direct provides instant answers before you click the Search button. Find an address or phone number, a three-day weather forecast, financial stock performance, the top trending stories at Yahoo! News, or when and where a movie is playing – all without going to a results page.
• Direct Results – When you scan the search options and find the site you need, Search Direct provides exactly that – direct access to the site. No more overwhelming pages of links.
• Rich Content – For all top searches about sports, top news stories, and finance, Search Direct displays rich content that only the world’s largest digital media company can provide. For example, type “n” to get the Yahoo! News display, which always shows the top two trending stories.

We will continue to enhance and update Search Direct with new content, such as popular music and local listings.  For more information and a demo video of Search Direct from Yahoo!, visit search.yahoo.com

We live in a beautifully content rich world. More than 3.5 million photos get uploaded to Flickr every day. On email we receive nearly 2.5 billion emails each day, and many of us send hundreds of texts and tweets per month. Simply put, life is digital. In order to enjoy and share all this content, people want much more than a PC experience replicated on their tablet or phone—they want something fundamentally new.

As the premier digital media company, we see a clear opportunity to push the boundaries of personalization to deliver intelligent experiences specifically tailored for each individual.  This ultra personalized content experience is our vision for Livestand from Yahoo! – a digital newsstand, delivering a wealth of ever-changing content from multiple publishers, continuously programmed by a person’s interests and contexts.

With Livestand from Yahoo!, what you’re reading will be personalized based on your interests, your location and even the time of day.  Your experiences, which will begin on tablet form factors, will include intuitive touch interactions and an elegant design that focuses foremost on the content.

As the media landscape continues to evolve with mobile and tablet experiences top of mind, publishers and advertisers must expand their content to these platforms to stay in front of consumers.  We see an opportunity to provide publishers and advertisers with a pipeline for fresh and active content and to help them reach and engage their most valuable audiences.

With Livestand, we’re using ad formats that evoke the emotion of TV advertising with a highly-visual magazine-like experience.  And they’re combined with the effectiveness of an Internet ad that’s data-rich, actionable, even location aware.  It’s all personalized and in context – just like our content.

In the first half of 2011, you’ll see Yahoo!’s vast digital content library come to life through Livestand from Yahoo! – from Sports, News, Finance, Flickr, omg!, and the Yahoo! Contributor Network – as iPad and Android tablet applications.

Stay tuned here for more updates over the coming weeks.

Blake Irving, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!
@Blakei

We designed the Yahoo! Contributor Network especially for you, our users, and we’re inviting you to share your perspective and creativity on some of our most popular content sites – including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, omg!, Shine, and even the Yahoo! homepage. The Yahoo! Contributor Network gives you an unprecedented opportunity to reach the largest audiences on the Internet on the topics that matter to you most.

You’ll be joining the world’s largest community of independent contributors, more than 400,000 writers, photographers, and videographers.

How do you get involved? Simply fill out a form on our registration page and you’re ready to get started. Once you register as a contributor, you can start submitting articles, videos, audio and images – or claim assignments from Yahoo! editors and you might be published on one of Yahoo!’s sites. And better yet, you’ll earn money based on the performance of your articles.

If you’re already an Associated Content contributor, it’s even easier. Sign in to the Yahoo! Contributor Network using your existing username and password and continue to share your content, with an even larger audience.

We encourage you to check out the site today and join up with our growing community of contributors. It’s an incredible opportunity for exposure and distribution of your work.
We look forward to hearing from you!

-Luke Beatty, VP & General Manager

So what does this mean for you? If you are one of the 300 million Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger users worldwide, we’re making it easier to access feature-rich Yahoo! experiences on two of the fastest growing mobile platforms in the market, Android and HTML5-capable browsers.  Get more details on the Yahoo! Messenger app on the Yahoo! Messenger Blog here.

With the new apps for Android, we created fast, easy-to-use and visually stunning experiences for Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, providing rich full-featured experiences right on your Android device, and built from the ground up for the Android platform. We also introduced a Yahoo! Search Widget for Android to provide quick and convenient access to Yahoo! Search, making search easily accessible directly on your home screen. Check out more details on the Yahoo! Search Blog here.

In another exciting new release, we’re leveraging the cutting-edge features of HTML5 and introducing a new Yahoo! Mail web-app, plus a Yahoo! News site, for the iPhone and iPod touch.

The new Yahoo! Mail for mobile web is the most advanced mobile web-app we’ve ever created, making full use of client side databases and advanced caching capabilities, we’re offering faster access, powerful search, and rich content & message previews surfaced directly in the inbox. This amazing new experience is available in 28 languages in more than 200 countries. Read more about the all-new Yahoo! Mail on the Yahoo! Mail Blog here.

Our enhanced Yahoo! News includes a new layout with animated visual effects and navigation that utilizes touch gestures to deliver a compelling news experience.

We’ve been working hard, and listening carefully to our users’ feedback to understand what our consumers want, how a sophisticated mobile experience should behave, and how we could harness the latest cutting-edge technology. The result is a collection of incredible new experiences that represent our continued commitment to provide best-in-class products, while creating a modern and flexible platform for continued innovation and development. We hope you’ll love using these new experiences as much as we’ve loved creating them!

Here is a video with more on Today’s news:

Jason Titus
VP, Yahoo! Mail & Messenger

Irv Henderson
VP, global, mobile products

Starting this week, we will be bringing this vision to life in the Yahoo! products you use every day.  We are starting to integrate Facebook in a big way, a result of the agreement we first signed with Facebook last December. People who use Yahoo! and Facebook can now link their accounts to view and share updates with friends across both networks.  This means you can see your Facebook News Feed from your Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Mail, and other favorite Yahoo! sites and services.  When you create and share content on our properties – including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Answers, and many of our entertainment sites, such as omg!, Yahoo! TV, and Yahoo! Music – you can share that content on Facebook.

Beyond Facebook, your activities on Yahoo! are another important way of bringing social experiences together. Globally, Yahoo! now has more 80 sites producing socially infused content, including three million photos and videos uploaded daily to Flickr, 1.1 million answers provided daily on Yahoo! Answers, and thousands of comments posted daily on articles across Yahoo! sites. These social actions – what we call Yahoo! Updates – can be found in many places across Yahoo!, within products you use and on Yahoo! pages you visit every day.

Our vision is to provide a central hub for people’s online lives, and we understand that requires a Web you can trust.  That’s why this week Yahoo! is making privacy settings even easier to use with a central dashboard.  Rolling out this week as a re-fresh of Yahoo! Profiles, Yahoo! Pulse is a dashboard that makes it simple to set and manage your activities and privacy on Yahoo!.

Expect more to come and until then, share, update your status, and tell us what you think.

Jim Stoneham, Vice President of Communities

Cody Simms, Senior Director, Yahoo! Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN)

Following in the footsteps of popular US Yahoo! entertainment portal OMG, which launched in June 2007, The Hype has generated much excitement amongst the team here in Australia.

The Hype draws in content from Yahoo!7 Movies, Yahoo!7 Music, Yahoo!7 TV, and our PLUS7 catch-up TV service, plus leveraging the great editorial from our magazine partners and featuring daily unique content from our on-the-pulse editorial team.  An exciting and exclusive new feature we are offering is The Hype Daily Gossip Show, which gives a three minute video wrap of the latest celebrity and entertainment news and gossip each week day by 9 am. There is also a weekly newsletter which delivers the hottest galleries, news, gossip and video straight to the inbox of subscribers.

Without wanting to blow our own trumpet too much (but why not!), Yahoo!7 has already established a huge following with entertainment–hungry Australians. We received four times the traffic of our nearest competitor after the Logies (the Australian TV Awards), and with the launch of The Hype are excited to be the country’s number one online entertainment destination.

Kath Hamilton, Director of Audience, Yahoo!7

As the newest Yahoo! employee, at the risk of being highly corny, I’m delighted to yodel my first purple-hued shout-out to the 600 million people and tens of thousands of advertisers and publishers who enjoy Yahoo!’s products every day.

Some of you might ask why anyone would say goodbye to surfing and cycling the Central Coast of California or travelling the globe with their family to take on the job of leading products and technology at Yahoo!  My answer’s pretty easy – meet just some of the brilliant people at Yahoo! that want to change the world, and then scan the amazing list of leading products around the globe these people have delivered at scale.  When I think about what this company has meant to anyone who has used the Internet, worked in the Internet industry, or wanted to reach people across the world, there is simply none better.

From wildly popular services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr and Yahoo!’s mobile sites and apps, to Yahoo!’s best-in-class content properties like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports, to many, many other great products across the world, Yahoo!’s product portfolio continues to be the envy of the industry.  Those incredible services and their respective audiences bring tremendous value for advertisers, which is why Yahoo! serves up 10 billion ads across its network every day and is the #1 publisher of online display advertising. How can anyone not want to be a part of that?

And that’s just what consumers and advertisers see from the outside.  Inside Yahoo!, there’s technological and scientific brilliance everywhere you look.  With 500 patents, one of the world’s largest cloud computing infrastructures, and top scientific talent across computer science, machine learning, economics and social sciences, I’m awed at the caliber of people I’m going to be working with. The intellectual horsepower doesn’t stop there – I’m looking forward to working with some of the smartest and best-in-class talent around the world in marketing, advertising sales, partnerships, programming, service engineering and operations.  The commitment Yahoos have shown over the years to delivering the best experience to both consumers and advertisers is one of the key things that attracted me here.  We’re in the business of delivering bespoke experiences to our consumers, partners and advertisers and I’m looking forward to working with all of you to build on that reality.

This week marks an exciting new journey for me personally, and I’m thrilled to be sharing my experiences and background with the world class people at Yahoo!  We have big opportunities, as well as big challenges ahead of us, and I’m getting ready to dive in and work with this great team to make Yahoo! even more central to daily online life than it has been over the past decade and a half.

My first day in the office will be May 17^th and I can’t wait to get started. Stay tuned for more as I get settled and dig in with my new team.

‘Nuff said.

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

Want to use your Yahoo! ID to tap into Arianna Huffington’s mind? How about any of the other contributors on the Huffington Post? If so, we have some good news. Starting today, you can use your Yahoo! ID to log into the Huffington Post with just a couple of clicks.

This is just one of the new features Huffington Post has enabled by tapping into our Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) platform. Y!OS is built on the idea that Yahoo! is more fun and personally relevant when we’re open to the best of the Web and when we make it easy for you to share and connect with who matters to you on Yahoo!. And in addition to letting you use your trusted Yahoo! ID on the Huffington Post, Y!OS technology is also powering two other great new features that are live today.

The first is Yahoo! Updates. Once you’ve logged into the Huffington Post with your Yahoo! ID, you’ll also be able to automatically share the comments you make there with your friends and contacts on popular products like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger.

The second is a new application for the Yahoo! Homepage that you can use to get a quick view into the hottest Huffington Post articles across 80 categories in a matter of seconds.

Finally, we’re also teaming up with the Huffington Post through Yahoo! News to feature and develop specialized articles, opinion pieces and reporting. Across Yahoo! we’re always looking for ways to bring you great content, whether it’s our own original reporting through our Yahoo! Newsroom Blogs, or from great sites like the Huffington Post, a leading voice in digital news.

To get started trying out these capabilities and sync up your Huffington Post and Yahoo! experiences, head over to the Huffington Post and click on the log in with Yahoo! ID button, install the new Huffington Post App on Yahoo.com or head straight to Yahoo! News.  Or better yet, try all three.

And if you run your own Web site and want to learn how to integrate with Yahoo!, check out our Yahoo! Developer Network and behind the scenes look at how Huffington Post did it. We’re excited to hear what you think.

Greg Cohn

Director of Strategy & Business Development for the Yahoo! Platform Technology Group

Today we’re taking a huge step in bringing more of Yahoo!’s most popular properties and services to mobile devices around the world. You can now have Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Fantasy Football and Flickr, with much of the same interactivity as on the PC, on your iPhone or iPod touch (via the App Store) and select BlackBerry models (Bold, Tour, and 8900 series). It’s all part of our effort to help you stay connected.

The new Yahoo! Finance app, available on the iPhone or iPod touch and compatible BlackBerry models, helps you stay on top of the market, your portfolio, and the latest news, research, and analysis with powerful interactivity. The app lets you:

• Follow the broad market indices or a specific company
• Access the top financial news stories
• Follow your personalized portfolio from Yahoo! Finance
• Drill down into specific company information (news, chart, financial metrics)
• Get currency conversions on the go
• Watch streaming video from Tech Ticker

The new app is available in English for the U.S. and Canada and we expect to support more languages and countries in the near future, so stay tuned!

The new Fantasy Football app, available on the iPhone or iPod touch and compatible BlackBerry models, ensures that when you’re away from your computer or TV, you’ll still be in the know when your team puts points on the board. You’ll have up-to-the-minute access to rosters, players, live scores via Stat Tracker, and the latest expert analysis and news. The new app lets you:

• Edit your bench (add and drop) directly from your phone
• View matchups, standings, player and team stats, etc.
• Get live scoring just like on the PC
• Get news and expert advice just like you’re used to on the PC

This app is available in English for the U.S. and Canada – those football-loving nations.

Flickr fans will be amazed by the functionality in their new Flickr iPhone/iPod touch app – starting with the Ken Burns-effect on famed Flickr images when you first launch it. In addition to being able to share and discover photos and videos, you can also take advantage of location-based information when uploading new stuff. The new app lets you:

• Easily upload and tag photos and video while on the go
• Automatically geo-tag before you upload (opt-in required)
• Add and view photos and videos by tags & sets
• Share photos with friends via email
• Search photos and videos from the Flickr community all over the world by subject, people, or places
• See your contacts’ recent photos and activity
• Make comments and mark photos as favorites

The new Flickr app is available in English, French and traditional Chinese for the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Hong Kong, and Singapore – with more to come.

And don’t despair if you don’t have an iPhone/iPod touch or one of the compatible BlackBerry devices. You can always access these three popular services from the mobile web – just head to Flickr (http://m.flickr.com), Yahoo! Finance (http://m.yahoo.com/finance), and Fantasy Sports (http://m.yahoo.com/fantasy). And be sure to visit the new Yahoo! Mobile Homepage (http://m.yahoo.com) and personalize it with your favorite content and services from across the Internet.

Keep an eye out for additional mobile offerings across a lot more devices as we continue to bring the best of Yahoo! to mobile users around the world.

David Ko
SVP, Yahoo! Mobile

This deal is part of Yahoo!’s broader strategy to grow our international business, particularly in emerging markets. In many countries, vast populations — and advertisers — are just starting to come online. The potential is tremendous. Yahoo! has a large and growing audience in these markets today, and our acquisition of Maktoob represents the kind of investment we’re making to cater to the needs of these promising regions.

We plan to join forces with the Maktoob team, the strongest in the region, to create locally relevant content, services, and programming. That’s no easy task when you consider the differences between countries like UAE, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But we’re committed to literally translating our winning formula for this growing market in many ways, including through locally-based editorial teams.

Initially, we’ll plan to introduce Arabic versions of Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Search, and our homepage and then eventually local versions of properties like News, Sports, and Finance. We’ll also focus on creating content and services tailored to the region. No other global company has made this kind of investment in local relevance for the Arab world.

Arabs are vastly underserved by today’s Internet offerings. The World Bank estimates that there are 320 million Arabic speakers around the globe, yet less than one per cent of online content is written in their language (despite a vibrant Arabic blogosphere). We have a big opportunity to meet this growing demand, and we think Yahoo!, building on Maktoob’s local expertise, brings the scale and heft to draw many more people online in the region –- and we plan to give them compelling reasons to log on.

We also recognize the Middle East is deeply complex, a complexity mirrored in the online world, and that it will present certain challenges. As an Internet pioneer in the emerging markets, we’ve learned important lessons and we’re committed to responsible global engagement. This means being sensitive to local laws, customs, and norms while also protecting and promoting the rights of our users. We believe our engagement in the Middle East can be a positive force for people by increasing access to information, supporting a thriving marketplace for the exchange of ideas, and bridging local, regional, and international communities.

It’s easy to forget the fastest growing Internet audiences are in the emerging markets. That’s not lost on us. We’re passionate about growing our presence in places like Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, and Africa. And we can’t wait to yodel in the Middle East.

In an effort to keep things brief here on Yodel, we have provided a link to the press release and we have also created an informational site that should answer many of your questions.

Keith Nilsson
Senior Vice President, Emerging Markets

Let’s start with Yahoo! Mail.
After much testing, today we’ve reached a significant Yahoo! Mail milestone by bringing the best of the web – including photosharing, third-party apps and social features – to people’s inboxes… all 300 million inboxes around the world.

For photo hounds, we’ve introduced new multi-select and drag-and-drop functionality that makes it easier to attach photos, view thumbnail previews, and rotate images before you send them. And we’ve upped the photo and filesize limits from 10MB to 25MB.

We’ve also streamlined the inbox experience to further expand the social and open capabilities. A new Application Box brings third-party open apps like PayPal, Picnik, Xoopit, and ZumoDrive together with Flickr, Calendar and Notepad to make managing your email folders easier. Plus, we’re excited to add a new app to the gallery in a few weeks from Evite. With the Evite app you’ll be able to create invitations, check on events, and add items to your Calendar all from one place. And we are only scratching the surface on the apps available. Stay tuned as we roll out additional apps worldwide and specific apps for regional markets over the coming year.

Your inbox will soon be a bit more social, filtering out the noise by surfacing the most recent emails from your contacts and giving you birthday reminders. In addition, we’ve improved Yahoo! Contacts so you can automatically get updates when a contact changes their name, e-mail address or phone number.

We’ve also redesigned Yahoo! Mail for the mobile web (http://m.yahoo.com), giving you one-click access to check, compose and search email; allowing attachment downloads like Microsoft Office, PDFs and photos; and letting you access personal folders on the go. It’s available today on the iPhone and will be released on 400 other devices with HTML browsers on September 1st.

Here’s a video tour of some of the new features in Yahoo! Mail:

Introducing Yahoo! Messenger 10
With this new release of Yahoo! Messenger, the biggest news is the debut of truly high quality video calling. Using your Web cam, you can now have full-screen, face-to-face video conversations with crystal clear audio for free from right within your Yahoo! Messenger window. Messenger is also more getting social as we roll out new features to help you stay in closer contact with friends and family. A new “Updates” tab gives you a quick glimpse of what your contacts are up to – including status updates, Flickr uploads, Yahoo! Buzz stories, Tweets and more. Since our popularity only grows around the globe, we’re also letting you customize your client with one of 16 languages without having to download a different version. And finally, an improved iPhone Messenger app ensures the same great experience with your contacts’ messages even when you’re on the go.

Download the Messenger 10 Beta here: http://messenger.yahoo.com/winbeta. And be sure to check out a demo of what’s new in Yahoo! Messenger 10:

Testing the new Yahoo! Search.
To prove just how committed we are to continued innovation in your search experience, we’re testing a new search results page that ups the ante on personal relevance. We’re providing new tools for refining results that let you explore related concepts, display only results from popular Yahoo! and third-party sites, and narrow results by types of content like people, videos, and discussion forums.

We’re also using advanced science to detect what you’re searching for based on your search history. For example, if you search for “cat” and then later for “jaguar” we can figure out that you’re looking for content about the animal and not the car.

We’re running random bucket tests (no opt-in at this time) of this new version of search with a small subset of our users. In case you’re not one of the lucky millions, here’s a sneak preview of what we’re testing:

Finally, following the lead of the new Yahoo! Homepage, which now proudly wears our corporate color, we are introducing a new “universal header” across every Yahoo! product and service in the U.S. It not only sports a purple logo, it also features a Yahoo! Search box that integrates Search Assist on every page. We never want you to have to go far to find what you’re looking for.

Check out screenshots of our various enhancements as well as more details of today’s news at our Press Room and over at the Yahoo! Messenger Blog and the Yahoo! Mail Blog.

Bryan Lamkin
SVP Yahoo! Applications

One thing this recession has created is a society of unapologetic penny pinchers. We’re frugal and proud. That’s why we’ve just spruced up Yahoo! Deals, first launched in November, which now features more great bargains, including grocery coupons, local deals, and even the ability to share your dollar-saving discoveries.

Take Yahoo! Search trends, for example. Searches for “printable coupons” on Yahoo! are up 50 percent in 2009, compared to the same time in 2008, and up 135 percent compared to 2007. The most popular coupon-related searches? Coupons for pizza, major retailers and groceries. And while there are signs of economic recovery, our wallets remain cautious. In a recent Yahoo! survey, 43 percent of participants said they’re using coupons more since last year.

In addition to daily deals, weekly electronic circulars, and online coupons from major retailers, here’s what you’ll find on our refreshed site:

• Grocery coupons for all kinds of kitchen staples, provided by Coupons.com
• Coupons for local chain and neighborhood restaurants, retailers and service providers provided by Valpak
• Exclusive deals from new partners including Visa and Next Jump; Ecobunga! and Greenzer (for eco-friendly products); TechBargains.com and LogicBUY (for computers and electronics); plus coupons and deals on a variety of products from CouponAlbum, CouponMountain, BradsDeals.com and Dealnews
• The gas finder module that helps you find the cheapest gas by zip code
• Improved search so you can quickly find deals from across the site
• Video stories on consumer shopping trends and savings tips provided by Inside Edition
• New social features that let you share deals with friends via email and popular social networks, and to save deals for later use
• The ability to post or read comments on each deal

So whether you’re a bona fide cheapskate or just an average Joe riding out the recession, check out deals.yahoo.com to start saving money today!

Greg Hintz
Head of Yahoo! Shopping

Photo from sgrace

While you’ll read a lot about why this is good for our business and for advertisers, I want to talk about what’s in it for you -– the Yahoo! fan.

Here’s the rundown:

• Better search: You’ll still find search boxes all across Yahoo!, but this deal will make the difference between a great Yahoo! search experience and an awesome one. Some of the biggest brains in the business work on Yahoo! Search, and they will continue to innovate to create a better search experience on Yahoo!. As a result of the deal, Microsoft, which has great technologists and deep pockets,will have the scale to bring users faster, more useful and more personally relevant search.
• Better everything else: With Microsoft powering Yahoo! Search, we’ll be able to focus on the things we do best -– being the center of people’s lives online with properties like our homepage, mail, finance, news, sports, entertainment, mobile, etc. Sure, we’re the world’s largest online media company and your loyalty has made that possible. But we’re not satisfied – we still want you to say “wow” a lot more often. And that’s what makes this deal especially exciting.
• Better competition: Competition equals innovation. But with one player dominating 70% of search, that field has been pretty lopsided. This transaction will create a healthy competitor that’ll keep everyone on their toes.

In short, everything’s just going to get a whole lot better for you.

And one final note — what this agreement does not cover is any of Yahoo!’s other properties or products. In those areas, Microsoft can expect a fierce competitor.

We’ve set up a special site, www.choicevalueinnovation.com, that answers your questions.

Carol Bartz
CEO

Enter Xoopit, which Yahoo! signed an agreement to acquire today. Their name may sound familiar – they won our Open Hack Day last fall and we teamed with them in December to launch the “My Photos” app in Yahoo! Mail, which many of you are already using today. In fact, it’s the most popular third party app in Yahoo! Mail.

With the integration of Xoopit’s platform technology and capabilities, the task of sending photos via email will be as easy as it should be and sharing photo albums with friends and family members will also be a cinch. You’ll be able to share your pictures among a group of friends or family like never before – combining pictures from numerous sources into a single album for a private group to view. And soon your inbox will become an organized photo index as well. Just imagine having a tool that collects all the photos you’ve sent and received over the years into that scrapbook you’ve never had time to assemble.

In short, Xoopit will bring phenomenal photo organization, improved photo sharing, and the serendipity of discovering forgotten photos to Yahoo! Mail.

Why is this such a big deal? Yahoo! Mail is actually home to one of the largest online photo repositories in the world. And every day, millions of you use Yahoo! Mail as your primary way to share the photos of important moments in your lives. While social networks and community sites are great for sharing photos with everyone you know, we realize it’s not for everyone or every occasion. For many, email is still best for sharing photos among a more select group of friends or family. And now we’re making it all that much easier for you.

For a flavor of what’s to come, take a look at this quick demo of how Xoopit currently works in Yahoo! Mail’s “My Photos” app.

BTW: I know what you’re thinking. In comes the guy who oversaw Photoshop for 13 years and all he can think about is photos? Well, rest assured a smart team was thinking about solving this problem well before I showed up on Yahoo!’s doorstep. And it’s just one of the many things on our plate to ensure we’re improving our products!

Please join me in welcoming the talented Xoopit team to the Yahoo! family. We can’t wait to help you tap your inbox for all those great photos waiting to be rediscovered.

Bryan Lamkin
SVP Yahoo! Applications

PS: For you Gmail+Xoopit users out there who’ve been waiting for an excuse to switch to Yahoo!, here’s your chance. But, in the meantime, we will still be providing support for your Xoopit Firefox Add-on.

You’ll soon see for yourself. Starting today, anyone living in the U.S. can opt-in to the new page by visiting http://yahoo.com/trynew, and our friends in France, India, and the UK will have access to localized versions in the coming week. We’ll start rolling out to other markets in the next month.

This new launch represents the most significant change to our homepage since the company’s inception. Our new homepage has been built around the people who use it and we’ve made sure every pixel counts. Gone is the sea of links to Yahoo! products – that was really more about us than you. And you only used a handful anyway, so why not let you decide how to use that real estate?

You can now customize your Yahoo! homepage (with a click or two) and make it your own, bringing in your favorites websites, whether they’re from Yahoo! or somewhere else on the Web. That means there could eventually be more than 110 million individual versions of our homepage out there in the U.S. alone – with people adding content that could range from Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Finance, and omg! to Gmail, epicurious, NPR, The New York Times, Facebook, and much more. The sky’s the limit.

You’ll see and hear a lot more from us in the coming weeks about this new design, but here are highlights of what’s new:

• My Favorites – You can easily choose from a dashboard of more than 65 apps to add directly to your homepage, including different email providers (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail), best of breed content sites (Barron’s, NPR, omg!, USA Today), popular social networking sites (Facebook and MySpace), and dozens of others. These apps let you preview, interact with, or navigate to your favorite sites from one easy check-in point.
• App Maker – You can create your own app on the fly by adding virtually any URL of your choice.
• Trend Setter – A new trends snapshot lets you keep tabs on the most popular Yahoo! searches, insights from Yahoo! Buzz, and fun facts from around the Web.
• PC to Mobile Sync (coming soon) – Whatever new apps you add on your computer stay with you when you’re mobile.
• News, Your Way – Your news is now hyper-local and you can also toggle the main news module for more of the big news that matters.
• Social Updates – You can now share your current “status” with friends directly from the homepage, see what your friends are doing across the Web, and integrate with leading social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Over the years, we’ve evolved our homepage to help you simplify the Web and your life, which both only seem to get more complicated. (Did you know the average person in the U.S. visits 85 sites a month? Exhausting.) You’ve got your world to stay on top of and the rest of the world. Now you can do it all in one place and get more done, faster.

One other thing you’ll notice is that we’re now sporting a new purple logo, officially ushering in Yahoo!’s long-standing corporate color. The legacy red logo, chosen in 1995 because purple often resolved closer to blue or brown on old monitors and red popped better against our historically gray background, has been retired in favor of the color that is truly synonymous with Yahoo!.

Oh, and tremendous thanks to the millions of you who tested the site, told us what you loved and hated, tested it again, and guided us to this final design. Since we run one of the most trafficked sites on the Web, we don’t take changes lightly. Your experience drives everything we do and your feedback was invaluable. Thanks for letting us listen.

Learn more here and then go check out the new Yahoo! Homepage at http://yahoo.com/trynew. And here are some screenshots and photos of the site’s 15-year evolution.

Tapan Bhat
SVP, Integrated Consumer Experiences

The passing of the King of Pop set multiple records across Yahoo!. On our front page, the story “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was the highest clicking story in our history. It generated a whopping 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes and news of his death saw 560,000 clicks in 10 minutes. Also, the news area on our front page experienced five times the amount of traffic it normally receives.

Yahoo! News set an all-time record in unique visitors with 16.4 million people, surpassing our previous record of 15.1 million visitors on election day. Four million people visited the site between 3-4pm Pacific time, setting an hourly record. We also recorded 175 million page views yesterday, our fourth highest after Inauguration Day, the day after the Inauguration, and Hurricane Ike.

In Yahoo! Music, a staggering 21,000 people left comments on a blog post about the music legend. And over on Flickr, more than 4,000 Michael Jackson-related images have been posted in the last day, including art images labeled as “in tribute” and photos of spontaneous memorials all over the world, such as this Thriller “flashdance” in San Francisco.

Also, here’s a behind-the-scenes look at our search logs, revealing what our users were most curious about as they tried to reconcile the news:

• Michael Jackson – including variations of his name and nicknames
• Photos – especially for photos of his face and how it changed throughout the years; also, searches for “plastic surgery“
• Videos – both videos of Michael Jackson and his music videos
• Music – Jackson Five music and his solo work; also searches for his albums and songs
• Songs - including lyrics, especially for hits like Thriller, Man in the Mirror, Billy Jean, and PYT
• Questions – “did Michael Jackson die?”, “who is Michael Jackson?” (!!), “when did Michael Jackson die?”, “why did Michael Jackson die?”
• Cardiac arrest – and other medical terms mentioned in the news
• People – lots of searches for Jackson family members; notable friends like Quincy Jones, Elizabeth Taylor, his lawyer; ex-wives Debbie Rowe and Lisa Marie Presley; and his children
• Elvis Presley – not just because of the Lisa Marie connection, but people want to know how old Elvis was when he died
• Places - Holmby Hills, UCLA Medical Center, Encino, and his house location
• Hoax rumors – given that TMZ.com was the first to confirm his death, people wondered if it was all true. Then came rumors of Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum’s deaths.
• RIP Michael Jackson – was very prominent in Twitter
• Drugs – for the pain killer Demerol and other variations/spellings
• Celebrity death in threes – because apparently people are superstitious
• How to moonwalk – because nobody did it better

And that’s just from yesterday…

Michael Jackson’s death was clearly a seminal event. And unlike in the 1970s, we all have a remarkable tool that brings the world together — informed and connected — over those “I remember when…” moments.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Image from thechorompys

Beginning today, with the launch of Yahoo! My Display Ads, businesses of all sizes can easily launch display advertising campaigns on Yahoo! to reach the targeted audiences that matter to them most. The new solution is an easy and affordable way to create and run display ads on Yahoo! – even without a major ad budget. In fact, a campaign can cost you as little as $30 per day.

So, how does it work?

Let’s say you own a local boutique shop and you want to reach local-area women. With Yahoo! My Display Ads, you can build a customized ad campaign in a matter of minutes. First, choose from our more than 800 ad templates (organized by business category) and customize the text, images, colors and add your company logo —no design expertise necessary. Then, set your budget and decide who you want to target — by Yahoo! channel content, age, demographics, and location. For example, you could target females between the age of 18-24 in your city. (Keep in mind, though, that the more you target, the less potential traffic you may receive. We recommend starting broad and working your way smaller.) You can even decide whether you want to pay by how many times your ad was viewed or by how often it was clicked on. Finally, we give you daily reports on how ads are performing and let you easily adjust your campaign on the fly.

We partnered with Seattle-based AdReady to develop this service, marking the first time that businesses with ad budgets of all sizes can reach localized portions of Yahoo!’s 165 million users in the U.S. with targeted display ads. To learn more, check out mydisplayads.yahoo.com and get started!

Amanda Reierson
Director, B2B Marketing

The new Yahoo! Toolbar now offers greater customization and more immediate access to the information you care about most from across the entire web – not just Yahoo! sites. Currently available if you’re using Internet Explorer 6+ and now for Firefox (as a beta), too, our new toolbar also helps you do some really handy things, including:

• Preview and Go: Most of us have sites we check every day –- sometimes more than once. Now you can preview information from your favorite sites directly within your toolbar. Small previews drop down from your toolbar, giving you real-time information without ever having to leave the page you’re on. Customize your toolbar with dozens of apps from Yahoo! and across the rest of the web, so you can check on your multiple email inboxes (Yahoo! and AOL), your eBay listings, the latest news from People.com or USA Today, stock portfolios, and even your local weather or movie showtimes.
• Search Faster: One of the most popular features on toolbars is search. So, we’ve created a better, more efficient way for you to conduct web searches (with the help of some cool technology from Inquisitor). The search box in your Yahoo! Toolbar now offers query suggestions, recall of sites based on your recent search history, and the ability to directly search other web sites, like Flickr and Wikipedia — right from the search box. It’s a real time saver!

By bringing the best of the web together in one place, we want to make the web work better for you – right from within your toolbar. Get started by downloading the new Yahoo! Toolbar at http://toolbar.yahoo.com/.

Burke Culligan
Senior Director, Yahoo! Front Doors

What’s new, you ask?
We recently made the new Yahoo! Mobile (http://m.yahoo.com) available on the mobile Web across more than 300 devices and as an Apple iPhone app – both are available in eight countries, with more launching soon. We’ve moved out of beta and are in the process of rolling it out as our default mobile homepage.

Like the PC homepage we’re testing, the new Yahoo! Mobile has a more feature-rich design, letting you bring together your favorite content and services from across the Web, making it more personally relevant. For example, my experience is customized with my Yahoo! Mail, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo! Messenger accounts, as well as my various stocks, favorite blog feeds, and weather from my favorite cities. The beauty of it is that you can customize the experience to exactly what you want and add anything to the page.

As for the Web, we recently started testing some new designs based on your feedback. We recognize that many of you like your homepage just the way it is, thank-you-very-much, so the overall look and feel of the page will be familiar. But take a closer look, and you’ll see that we’ve made some fundamental improvements and packed in features that are easy to use and easy to make your own – things you have told us you want.

The “My Favorites” area on the left side of the page includes an applications “dashboard” with the ability to preview, interact with or navigate to your favorite sites – whether they’re on Yahoo! or elsewhere on the Web. It’s all fully customizable.

Here’s some of what’s new and cool:

• Lots more apps: We’re testing a growing library of apps that let you get more done without leaving the page. Some of these apps include eBay and MySpace, and content sites like USA Today and NPR. We also have newly developed apps for popular Yahoo! services like Messenger, Movies and Flickr.
• Social pulse: A new Yahoo! Updates app lets you keep up with your friends’ online activities directly on the homepage – such as a recently Buzzed article or a video uploaded to YouTube.
• Easier email: We’ve separated your individual email accounts as distinct apps, rather than a combined inbox, so that it’s faster and easier to get to the exact mail you want. This was a request we heard repeatedly during testing.

What about local personalization?
As a global company, it’s critical that we create localized homepages, and we’re testing them now in France, India and the UK. While we’ll provide a consistent experience across all our global homepages in terms of design, they will be customized with information and apps that are locally relevant. For example, the new homepage in India will include a Cricket app and a whole host of others that are India-centric, while the UK site will include apps such as underground alerts, news from the BBC, and more.

This screenshot shows London Underground alerts from Transport for London:

We’re excited about the new direction of our homepages, especially because you’ve helped us build them. The designs being tested are changing frequently based on your input. Stay tuned for updates in the months ahead as we roll them out more broadly.

Tapan Bhat
SVP, Integrated Consumer Experiences, Yahoo!

Today, Yahoo! Buzz in India is starting off with more than two dozen featured Indian publishers and we look forward to welcoming many more in the coming weeks and months. Since Yahoo! Buzz launched in the U.S. just over a year ago, more than 20,000 publishers from around the world have had stories “buzzed up.”

But that’s not all. We are introducing a new look for Yahoo! Buzz overall that more prominently features contributions from the site’s community. With our new “Buzz Updates” tab, we’re making it easier to follow the submitting, voting, and commenting activity of your friends and the larger Yahoo! Buzz community. And, you’ll also find it’s faster and simpler than ever to share the stories and videos you find most interesting, since we now automatically fill in the story headline and description when you submit a URL.

Take a look at the new Yahoo! Buzz:

And here’s the new Yahoo! Buzz in India:

Stay tuned for more about what’s next for Yahoo! Buzz, and in the meantime, keep buzzing and helping people find the most remarkable stories from across the Web.

Julie Demsey
Senior Director, Product Management, Yahoo! Buzz

Starting this week, we’ll be asking you to update your recovery data. Since the information we collected in the past – such as zip codes or birthdays – has increasingly become part of our public persona online, users will be given the option to provide additional information such as an alternate email address and new secret questions of their choice. U.S. users will also have the option to provide a mobile phone number. This updated information will let us help you faster in the event of a future recovery attempt – whether you’ve forgotten your password or your account has been compromised. It also lets us better protect you by creating a recovery process that includes information and questions that only you should be able to complete, with information only you should know.

Our goal is to have all Yahoo! users update this information. We’ll start prompting some users to update their data this week (note: you’ll only see this after you’ve logged in) and will continue reaching out to more and more users over the next several months. If you want to update your information proactively, visit https://edit.yahoo.com/commchannel/manage.

We hope everyone takes advantage of these new features and that, in the event you do forget your Yahoo! details, you find the recovery process as quick and painless as possible.

UPDATE: We’ve gotten some questions about how exactly you’ll be notified to update your account recovery information. You will NOT receive an email from us, but rather be prompted with a screen after you log in to your account. That said, you will receive an email from us to your Yahoo! and your alternate email address every time you update your data (ie, a new secret question). Please be mindful of any phishing attempts — emails that appear to be from Yahoo! but are not. You can read more about phishing and account security at our Yahoo! Security Center.

Sabari Devadoss
Platforms Product Manager, Yahoo! Membership

Photo from fragglerawker_03

We’ve been evolving our approach to music for the last year or so. We found that our subscription music offering required a huge amount of resources for a relatively small user base, leading to our partnership with Rhapsody. And new royalty rates made us to rethink our streaming radio service, which is now run by CBS. Through all of these tough decisions as the industry evolved, the biggest constant has been our core music offering, which connects music fans to their favorite musicians. We said, “Why compete with everyone, fighting on all fronts, if we can just move up a layer and be a resource to our users?”

So now we can be all things to all music people with a little help from our industry friends. The new Yahoo! Music Artist Pages now bring together downloads from iTunes, albums from Amazon; streams from Pandora, Last.fm and Rhapsody; music videos from YouTube; and tickets from Ticketmaster – for more than 500,000 artists. We also include photos from Flickr as well as our own Yahoo! music videos. You can customize your Artist Pages to include your favorite content modules. Previously a closed service with proprietary licensed content, this is the first major effort by any online music site to truly open itself up to third-party services.

And we’ll soon open up our site to developers so that any music service can build an application to host in our gallery. And eventually artists will be able to directly publish content to our site – so fans can keep tabs on their latest blog posts, photos, music videos, live recordings, etc.

The ultimate goal is help you discover, experience, and consume your favorite music online as easily as possible. So go out there and enjoy the music.

Michael Spiegelman
Head of Yahoo! Music

So what if you could make those kinds of little events happen more often? Wouldn’t it be great if — when you were sitting at home or in your office — you could see your friends in the neighborhood? Maybe you could even see if one of them was interested in finding a snack for lunch!

Yahoo! has a way for you to do just that. We’ve made an application called Friends on Fire that brings together Facebook and our Fire Eagle project to help you quickly and easily share your location with your trusted friends. And you can post little messages on the map, too, to recommend bars or restaurants, or to suggest meeting up for a beer!

We like to describe Fire Eagle as a place to store information about your location. You can get your location into Fire Eagle by using all kinds of different Fire Eagle updaters — from iPhones to websites. And then — if you want — you can choose to share your location with all kinds of applications all over the Internet. There are over 70 different applications in our gallery at the moment, and more appearing every day. We also give you control over how much you choose to share with these different applications. You can choose to share your cross-street or your country, you can hide yourself from everyone, and, of course, you can change your preferences at any time.

In addition to Friends on Fire, we’re also launching a new way to update Fire Eagle — a Firefox extension that adds a button to your toolbar. With one click, your location is instantly shared with your trusted friends on your favorite services.

And finally, for the developers among us, we have three new announcements that you can read about over on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.

In the meantime, we hope to see you guys trying out the Facebook app! And don’t hesitate to let us know what you think about it — we love to get your feedback.

Tom Coates
Head of Fire Eagle

First and foremost, we want to say congratulations to our members — this is truly a testament to their great work. Our community of more than 35 million members from all over the globe continue to amaze us with the authentic and individualistic images that they see in their daily lives and share on Flickr.

For the past few months, editors at Getty Images have been busy exploring the Flickrverse to find the right photos to be part of the collection – a task that is somewhat daunting when there are more than three billion images to choose from on Flickr. The goal was to choose photos that created a commercially viable collection, while preserving the inspirational and unexpected nature of the kinds of images that are so prevalent on Flickr. Like Flickr itself, this is a “living collection” and Getty Images will continue to add thousands of new images every month from here on out.

We see this as an exciting moment that’s breaking new ground for our members around the world, as well as the larger imagery industry. So what are you waiting for — start exploring the first set of photos on gettyimages.com/flickr.

Kakul Srivastava
Flickr General Manager

Photos courtesy of Flickr Collection/Getty Images

Today we have some exciting enhancements related to video on Flickr to announce:

• Video for All Members: We want to see what the rest of the community has to share, so we are extending the ability to upload video to all of our members. Free members can upload two videos per month, in addition to the 100MB monthly photo upload limit that’s already in place. Video, like photos, is quickly moving beyond a means to simply preserve memories and into a social activity that allows people to communicate and connect. As more devices have the ability to capture both, we’re seeing Flickr members capture videos along with photos to share their view of the world.
• Flickr in HD: Another trend that we’ve noticed is the growing appetite for higher-quality video. With the recent introduction of Nikon’s D90, Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II, Flip Mino HD, and others, it’s even easier to shoot videos in HD. Because our focus has always been on allowing our members to showcase their vision in the best way possible, we’re also enabling HD video uploading and viewing today. Only Pro members can upload videos in HD, but our entire community will benefit by being able to view high quality videos.
• Flickr Clock: All of us at Flickr love creative ways of exploring and visualizing imagery, and Flickr Clock is a new way that we want to celebrate and showcase the amazing video across the Flickrverse. Through Flickr Clock, members will be able to share their vision of what’s happening at any given minute around the world. We’ll be able to display these videos according to the approximate time that they were taken, so you can see what’s happening at different moments in time. Please help us build it into something truly unique and upload your best videos here.

It’s been truly amazing to see how creative our members can get using this medium – check out some of my favorite groups: My Day Yesterday, Timelapse Videos and Video! Video! Video!

And as with the rest of Flickr, we are continuing to evolve the video experience to make it more compelling, accessible and easy to use. So grab your cameras, and capture and share “long photos” of your own!

Here’s an HD demo from a fellow Flickrite’s commute to work:

Kakul Srivastava
Flickr General Manager

Starting today, Southwest will be testing inflight wi-fi. They’ve equipped one aircraft with Internet connectivity (via Row 44) and plan to add three more before the end of March.

Yahoo! has teamed up with Southwest to build the free inflight homepage (here’s a larger screenshot), where passengers can find a host of things to either help them wile away the hours or bone up on their destination city.

Plug in your city name and you’ll find guides for the best shopping, restaurant and attractions. You’ll also get the latest in localized news, weather, and events like concerts and art exhibits. Gaming fans can choose from among more than a dozen Yahoo! Games. And a local buzz tag cloud lets you track the topics that are most popular where you’re headed – whether it’s fusion restaurants or IMAX theaters.

What you won’t find on any other airline is a cool new flight tracker that not only tells you where you are, it lets you explore places on the ground via geo-tagged photos posted to Flickr. And it’s all free. You just need a wifi-enabled laptop.

So if you’re fortunate enough to board one of Southwest’s wifi-equipped planes, you’ll be surfing the Web as soon as it’s safe to release your tray table. Read more on the Southwest blog.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Introducing Search Pad, a new feature we’re testing on Yahoo! Search that helps you keep track of websites and take notes whenever you do research online. It intelligently understands when you’re in research mode and, if you choose, collects information about the sites you visit. You can create research documents with saved websites, edit and reorder your personal notes, and share them with friends. No more handwritten scrawls, Post-Its or scattered documents. And you can access them from wherever you are.

It’ll be a few months before we officially launch Search Pad. In the meantime, have a look at this screencast to get a sense of how it works. And head over to Yahoo! Search Blog for more details.

We’re excited to bring you search innovations like these, designed to help you get stuff done – faster and easier.

Larry Cornett
Vice President, Yahoo! Search

Also announced today is that Sue Decker will resign as president after staying on for a transitional period. She will leave Yahoo! after nearly nine years of contributing to Yahoo!’s growth. Jerry, who announced he would step down as CEO in mid-November, will remain at Yahoo!, returning to his role as Chief Yahoo.

Check out Techmeme for the buzz about the news.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor