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)

Open is at the core of many Yahoo! initiatives and products. Over the past two years Yahoo! has been hard at work to change how we develop products and interact with our developer community. In addition to being avid supporters of Open Source, we participated and adopted community-based specifications such as OpenID and OAuth, and were a founding member of the OpenSocial and OpenID Foundations.  As you can see, we love Open.

But Open isn’t always easy.

Whenever we (or other companies) engage in a collaborative effort with a wider community, we are faced not only with technical challenges, but with the complex reality of intellectual property law. Patents, copyright, and trademarks are not what geek dreams are made of. This is why we have actively supported the creation of the Open Web Foundation, an organization dedicated to the creation of an open, free, and community-driven environment for the development of technical specifications:

The Open Web Foundation was founded to help developer communities collaborate and share technical innovation on the web, bringing to the world of formats and protocols the same successful grassroots approaches established by the open source community. Modeled after the Apache Software Foundation and Creative Commons, the Open Web Foundation seeks to facilitate the creation and implementation of specifications with legal agreements that make such work simple, safe, and sustainable.

For the past year, the Open Web Foundation Legal Committee has been hard at work on a new legal agreement for licensing of open specifications. While Open Source software enjoys a wide range of licenses for making software freely available, specifications and standards are usually licensed under a complex set of rules and conditions. These licenses are hard to read and spread over many pages full of terms even many lawyers don’t fully understand. There was also no suitable standalone agreement available for companies and communities to use when making their work available, forcing them into long and costly legal negotiation between the contributors.

Today, the Open Web Foundation is announcing the availability of the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa), a reusable and straight-forward legal document, designed to be easily adopted by a wide range of specification communities and organizations.  Specifications made available under the Open Web Foundation Agreement may include everything from small ad-hoc formats sketched out among friends to large multi-corporation collaborations that ultimately grow into internationally recognized standards with the help of formal standards- setting organizations.

But what makes this agreement even more valuable today, is a commitment by a group of leading companies and individual contributors to apply it to a growing list of specifications. Today, Yahoo! is joining Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others in making available the following specifications under the OWFa:

* OAuth Core 1.0 Revision A
* OAuth WRAP 0.9
* Simple Web Tokens 0.9

We are also releasing the Media RSS (mRSS) specification under the Open Web Foundation Agreement. Media RSS is an RSS extension used to syndicate rich media content (instead of just text). The specification is used when providers of media content want to share that content with a third party, usually a search engine like Yahoo! Video Search. We are also in the process of transitioning the mRSS specification to the capable hands of the RSS Advisory Board for future development.

This is just the first step in what we hope will be a new path for open collaboration and innovation on the web. The best innovation happens when we let our talented engineers and product managers solve problems. This is one less thing for them to worry about.

Eran Hammer-Lahav

Director of Standards Development, Yahoo!
President, The Open Web Foundation

• Musical revival: Blowing its doors off their hinges, Yahoo! Music has fully embraced the open web with launch of its new Artist Pages. You’ll find downloads from iTunes; albums from Amazon; streams from Pandora, Last.fm and Rhapsody; music videos from YouTube and Yahoo!; photos from Flickr; and tickets from Ticketmaster – for more than 500,000 artists. And you call the shots on whatever modules you want to see. Eventually artists will be able to publish directly into their pages and developers will beef up our modules gallery. Music to our ears. More here.
• Instant iGratification: No need to get all twitchy when you leave your desk — Yahoo! Messenger is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Released into the wild this week, the free Yahoo! Messenger app can now be found in the iTunes App Store. It’s got a lot of the same bells and whistles — photo sharing, stealth mode, status messages, archiving, emoticons. More here. What?! You don’t have an iPhone? Lucky for you Yahoo! Messenger works with other phones, too — check the roster here.

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

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

Academic research is facing new challenges in today’s Internet age. Universities often don’t have the equipment –- hardware and software -– to maintain in-depth research at Internet scale. Academic researchers are limited in the research they can conduct, and this, ultimately constrains the amount of large-scale Web innovations coming to the marketplace.

Here at Yahoo!, we believe in open and collaborative research as the best way towards building the next generation of the Web. As part of our dynamic Academic Relations program, we’re teaming up with academia, as well as other companies and governments across the globe, to invest in and pool together the large-scale computers that will let researchers conduct truly breakthrough work on cloud computing and data storage systems.

The HP/Intel/Yahoo! Cloud Research Testbed is a significant step in that it will not only allow researchers to run applications and data on large-scale supercomputers, they will be able to experiment and conduct research on a massive scale. It’s like letting them simulate a true Web environment and that’s exactly what you need to ensure which ideas will work in the wild.

Joining us in this first-ever large-scale international consortium are Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, with contributions from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well.

This is all part of Yahoo!’s overall focus and investment in cloud computing and data infrastructure. We recently announced the formation of the Cloud Computing and Data Infrastructure Group (CCDI), a new group dedicated to building out our next-generation cloud infrastructure.

In addition, in November 2007, Yahoo! deployed a supercomputing-class data center, called the M45, for cloud computing research; Carnegie Mellon University was the first institution to take advantage of this supercomputer. In March 2008, Yahoo! announced an agreement with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to jointly support cloud computing research in India. The CRL supercomputer is one of the world’s top five supercomputers and is the first supercomputer available to academic institutions in India.

I speak for our many research scientists when I say we’re excited about this open testbed and being able to collaborate with leaders who share our same vision. The HP/Intel/Yahoo! Cloud Research Testbed is a truly global research effort, and more partners and researchers will be invited to join and participate in the program when all of the systems are up and running later this year. The sky is the limit from here on out.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Research

Photo from Nicholas_T

• Flickr groupies: If you’re a Flickr user who loves to share and share alike, you’ll dig the new groups feature that just debuted. Now when you visit any group, you’ll see an “Add Photos” link that launches a new tool that lets you add up to 6 photos or videos at a time from your photostream, your sets, tagged items, geo-tagged items, items uploaded on a specific date, etc. It makes it a whole lot easier to participate in groups that float your boat — whether you’re into photos of Utrecht, spiderwebs, backpacking the Northwest, polydactyl cats, or altered street signs.
• Opening your address book: Personal information geeks just scored big time. We’ve released the API for Yahoo! Address Book. What, you’re not schooled in browser-based authentication? Well, let’s just say the developer world is going to have a lot of fun building useful products and features for you by gaining authorized access to Yahoo! Address Books. Imagine taking your Address Book with you whenever you shop for gifts online. Or confidently allowing a third-party social network site to make it easy for you to send invitations to your contacts. Or being able to look up phone numbers for mobile applications. We can’t wait to see what those developers come up with.
• My (green) Yahoo!: With oil reaching an historic $140 a barrel, who doesn’t want to become obsessed with greener alternatives? Time to populate My Yahoo! with pertinent goods. The Hybrid Cars module lets you stay on top of all things Prius, plugin hybrid, and beyond. And the green-travel module from Yahoo! Groups lets you keep tab on tips from other environ-enthusiasts. It’s good for you, it’s good for the Earth.

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Here’s how to personalize it: After logging in and conducting a search in any Yahoo! Search box, you’ll notice a “Customize” link to the right of the yellow “Search” box. Select “Browse Gallery” in the pull-down menu and you’ll be taken to a list that, at last count, includes nearly 40 different options for enhancing Yahoo! Search. For example, if you select “Yelp,” your search results will include things like a preview of photos, reviews, rating, address, and phone number. If you select “Epicurious,” your search for pumpkin pie will include links to specific recipes from the popular foodie site. By selecting “Facebook,” any time you search for a name, you’ll get a thumbnail of that person’s public Facebook profile right within your search results. Other great enhancement options include LinkedIn, Howstuffworks.com, MTV.com, WebMD, Amazon, and a host of Yahoo! properties like Finance, Real Estate, Health, Autos, Local and Shopping.

We’ve set a few initial defaults for you with Yahoo! Video, Flickr and Yahoo! Travel and we’ll add to that list once we see which applications are most useful and popular. For the time being, if you want to see SearchMonkey results when you search, you need to add Enhanced Results and Infobars from the Search Gallery.

And, of course, this is just the beginning. It’s only been two weeks since we unleashed developer creativity on all of the possibilities SearchMonkey has to offer. There are plenty more innovations to come and a bunch of applications in the works.

Check out our Search Blog for more skinny and go here if you’re a developer ready for some monkey business.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor