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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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 become 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