Forty-six years ago today, a guy taking classes at the London School of Economics grabbed some friends and performed at a small jazz club in London. They didn’t get paid a dime. Two years later, they outranked the Beatles in popularity. After you hum a few bars of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” see what wild horses dragged out of us this week:

• Be the BOSS: We’re sitting on a goldmine of search infrastructure and thought it was about time we shared. Enter Yahoo! Search BOSS (short for Build Your Own Search Service), a new open Web services platform that brings DIY to one of the most valuable assets on the Web. If you’re a developer or owner of a site of any size, we’re giving you the keys to creating unlimited search mashups for the search experience of your dreams. If you’re a user, be prepared for searching to take on a whole new dimension when you’re visiting your favorite sites. We’re leveling the playing field and want everyone to play ball. More here, here, and here.
• Beta be gone: It’s official. The old My Yahoo! is being sent to Sunny Acres Farm on Monday, to be replaced with the *new* My Yahoo!. You’ll find a pile of new content like third-party (gasp!) modules from Netflix, Facebook, and Gmail, as well as custom-designed modules with more of the best stuff from select publishers (Entertainment Weekly, Forbes, People, Salon, Wall Street Journal, etc.). You also get more flexibility and control over page layout and easier customization tools. What’s more, the team has launched the My Yahoo Content Gallery, which presents cool cherry-picked modules that you can add with one click. And they’ve improved the search capabilities to surface content that’s related to your query. More here. Mine, mine. All mine!
• Pinpointing your peeps: Ever wondered where all those people you’ve met in your favorite Yahoo! Group are from? Now you can get a visual representation through People Map Beta, a new “grouplet” launched by our new “Groups Lab” team. Group owners and/or moderators fire off a form to their members, who voluntarily complete it with information that puts them on a map and becomes a dynamic mini-profile. More here. Stay tuned for more cool hacks from the Lab.
• I’m busy but this is really funny: If you’re an avid user of Yahoo! Messenger status messages, you know what a bummer it is when you have to tell people you’re busy, on the phone, away from your desk, etc. That’s because it means your friend won’t be able to click on your latest favorite video link. Or see that you’re peeved by coffee grounds. Or see what song you’re listening to. In the latest Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta, you’ll notice your days of sacrifice are now over. You can have your cake and eat it, too. More here on how to mix work with pleasure.

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When the Web first appeared, people browsed for the sheer serendipitous kick of it, but soon the Web became a place to get things done. Web search has witnessed a similar transformation: search engines have graduated from fielding ego queries to becoming the starting point for being productive. While search engines have evolved with these changing needs, we think search technology is far from mature.

What if your favorite news site had a search engine you could turn to when news breaks that not only surfaces the best articles on that topic, but also the most relevant content from across the Web? Or what if your search engine understood your social relationships or your site preferences and presented results with that in mind? When you’re searching for new music, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a search engine that knew your and your friends’ taste in music, drew in reviews from across the Web, and recommended songs you might enjoy?

Today we’re announcing a service that brings ideas like these a bit closer to reality.

Yahoo! Search BOSS, which stands for Build Your Own Search Service, is a new open Web services platform from Yahoo! Search that will allow developers and companies of all sizes to leverage one of the most valuable assets on the Web, the Yahoo! Search infrastructure. It lets them realize their own vision of what a search experience should be, enabling unlimited mash-ups and disrupting the search landscape.

BOSS will enable developers and companies to easily enter the search industry –- without large capital or resource expenditures — unleashing a wave of search innovation beyond any one of today’s search principals. Now anyone –- your favorite shopping site, an entrepreneur with a great idea or a start-up developer –- can tap into Yahoo!’s technology to create their own Web search experience without the infrastructure or talent resources needed to create one from scratch.

The result is that you’ll have more choice and flexibility in finding whatever you’re looking for on the Web –- just as you now have far more programming options with cable TV than when there were just three networks. (For examples of how BOSS technology can be used or to get started building your own search engine, visit the Yahoo! Developer Network.)

Stay tuned for more to come on how we are fundamentally changing the way you search.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Chief Strategist for Yahoo! Search

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.

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

You’re a developer. Your dream is to impact an insane number of people with your work. And you’re impatient — you don’t want to start small, dazzling just a few people with your coding wares.

Enter the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS). Imagine a world where you can write code that will meaningfully reach millions of users in a single bound. That’s the promise of an open Yahoo!.

Ari Balogh, our new CTO, just offered a preview at Web 2.0 Expo of a very new kind of Yahoo!. One that invites developers to take advantage of our huge scale to write applications that build on our existing properties (think Mail, Sports, Search, our front page, mobile, My Yahoo!, etc.), tap into millions of loyal users, and make Internet experience more relevant and useful. You’ve heard us hint at this for a while and now it’s right around the corner.

Think about it: Yahoo! serves more than 500 million unique users every month. We serve 120 billion page views per month. Yahoo! users spend 235 billion minutes a month on our sites. More importantly, some 10 billion relationships exist on user buddy lists and in Yahoo! address books. All that represents a mind-boggling audience for developers.

There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo!, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. We’re making Yahoo! more social, but we’re not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network… we just need to unlock it.

We are rewiring Yahoo!, building platforms that fundamentally change how Yahoo! works. We’re also opening up to developers to take advantage of the social aspects of our many favored destinations, creating what we call “vitality” — a lifeline into what’s happening with your social connections. We plan to open the best platform on the web, where tens of thousands of developers will create applications and features (many we’ve never even thought of) for our network and our consumers.

Of course, lots of Internet companies are on the “open” bandwagon. In fact, the bandwagon is getting pretty crowded (I’ve never actually seen a bandwagon, but go with me on this). Yahoo! has been in the “open” camp for years, starting simple with RSS feeds in 2003. And now Flickr is the second-most popular API on the Web. We’ve also been a leader in industry’s efforts to embrace open development.

A first taste of our strategy is SearchMonkey, which will let developers mash up helpful data with our search engine results. A Japanese restaurant would no longer be a simple link. Instead, it could include a photo, address, ratings, reviews, and links to online reservations. Search Monkey will be available in a few weeks. Make sure you come to our launch party on May 15th.

And it doesn’t stop there. Y!OS will let developers make Yahoo! portable so that everywhere you go, a more relevant, social and useful online experience is available to you. Shopping on a third-party site? Why not have instant access to your Yahoo! Address Book? I know I want it! ;-)

We’ve previewed Yahoo! OS with leading development shops and they’re very excited to do their thing on Yahoo!. In fact, they plan to dedicate a lot of resources to this platform. It all comes back to the size of the opportunity, right?

Today’s just the beginning. There’s plenty more to come in the months ahead!

UPDATE: Here’s a video of Ari’s Web 2.0 Expo keynote from this morning.

Neal Sample
Chief Architect, Platforms

From our travels across cyberspace, it’s pretty clear that the social part of the Internet is becoming more and more important to people. From chat to games to messaging to sharing things like news, entertainment, pictures, maps, movies and other “favorites,” users are looking for more ways to give contacts a sense of who they are and what they’re into. As social applications take the mash-up world by storm, a growing number of companies and data sources are opening up to give people the information they want, and developers are scrambling to create new applications that connect users with friends and colleagues.

Yahoo! has always been about helping users find and share information online, and we love giving our broad and loyal developer community the tools they need to keep innovating on this front. They echo our passion for creating the best Web experience for our users.

In this same spirit, we announced today that we’ve joined forces with Google and MySpace to create the OpenSocial Foundation, and will also begin supporting the OpenSocial standard. Industry consortiums such as this often start slowly and evolve over time. So far, OpenSocial is rapidly growing and adapting, but still in the early stages. We feel that this is the right step at this stage in its evolution. It’s no longer a trial balloon — it’s for real. We are taking this opportunity to help ensure websites and developers feel confident using OpenSocial as the building blocks for their new social apps.

We already offer Web services and APIs through the Yahoo! Developer Network that make it easy for developers to build applications and mashups that integrate data sources in new ways. We think OpenSocial will continue to fuel this innovation and make the Web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions.

We can only imagine the possibilities of what creative developers and publishers will do with these tools. Stay tuned for more on how we’ll be supporting OpenSocial and driving the OpenSocial Foundation to create an open and increasingly social Web.

Wade Chambers
VP of Platforms

We may have thousands of talented developers under our roof, but nothing beats the scale of the open source community — where programmers around the world volunteer their expertise to collaborate virtually in the name of tackling some of today’s toughest computing challenges.

That’s why we’re becoming a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, the non-profit that provides support for open source projects like the Apache HTTP server (which powers much of the Yahoo! network and has for more than 10 years), Lucene (the search software widely used on the Web), and Hadoop (which lets developers easily write and run applications that process massive amounts of data). All of these are community-driven efforts that will help define the future of web services.

We’re a big believer in giving back to this community After all, it could be the source of the next big breakthrough. You may recall that we recently unleashed a supercomputer, which researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are using as their distributed computing playground. We also have several engineers actively contributing to Apache’s Hadoop. In fact, we’re the project’s largest contributor and were so impressed with its potential, that we hired its founder, Doug Cutting, who’s also a VP at Apache.

We’ve been a huge open source beneficiary and hope our support of Apache will continue to improve the quality and expand the usage of critical software that will propel the entire industry.

Jay Kistler
VP, Systems, Tools and Services
Search & Advertising Technology Group