For starters, Flickr has added a Pinterest button in the share menu to easily “pin” photo pages, favorites, and groups. If you don’t want your content to be shared, you can disable sharing in your account settings and make the Pinterest option unavailable.

With Flickr images amongst the most popular content pinned to Pinterest, we believe your Flickr photos should be properly attributed to you, regardless of where they are pinned from.  Starting today, every image shared from Flickr will be clearly credited with the name of the photographer, the title, and a link from Pinterest to the photo page – this will also include all Flickr photos previously shared on Pinterest. The attribution cannot be edited, so even repins of images will be credited and linked back, so that people can leave comments, fave your photo, or contact you directly on Flickr.  This also works automatically for any Flickr photos embedded in websites or blogs, giving you much more certainty that you’ll be credited when your Flickr photos are shared on Pinterest.

You can read more about the new features on the Flickr Blog and on the Pinterest Blog.  Try them out and share your feedback as we continue to evolve Flickr and work to further protect the rights of photographers and content owners.

Photo: Available from Xerxes2k./ FLICKR: http://www.flickr.com/photos/quicksilver/6770210647/

As we reflect on what happened in the past year in our lives and in the world, it’s hard to remember each moment and what happened when.

Just this past year, Will and Kate had their magnificent wedding, Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Taylor passed away, Japan was ravaged by a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami, and the list goes on and on.

In my year, I spent time in Northern California, Vancouver, Minneapolis, and Montreal. I went snowboarding and wine tasting, I learned how to make cheese, I attended the Clinton Foundation Concert and saw Bono, Lady Gaga and Usher perform live, and I found out I will become an aunt.

I’ve been thinking about the past year a lot since one of my biggest recent projects has been creating a social extension for Yahoo!’s popular Year In Review program. Year In Review brings together data and insights gleaned from search and news trends and packages it up into top 10 lists, blog posts and videos. Looking at it from a social perspective, we knew we could make the year’s stories even more personal.

We had a lot of ideas, and ultimately created My Year In Review, a Facebook app that brings together the top headlines and images of the year with a user’s own activities in a timeline set to music. The experience is dynamic, beautiful, and emotional, bringing together moments you may have not thought of for month.

Depending on how heavy a Facebook user you are, the more times you play the experience, the more different versions you’ll see, with new pictures, news events, and new timeline images to share.

Don’t let us just tell you about it, though – see your 2011 My Year In Review.

A look back at the year in social at Yahoo!

It has been a big year for social at Yahoo! and I love how the company has embraced social as a medium not just for sharing out content, but for connecting with fans. We celebrated Yahoo! birthdays and milestones, launched new programs, and broke news – and the responses we got were tremendous. It has been encouraging to hear about how long people have used Yahoo!, the events they are most passionate about, and what we mean to them.

With our new focus on social, we also grew our fan base. The Yahoo! Facebook footprint now has more than 23 million fans, the Twitter footprint more than 1.6 million. 2011 was a year for experimenting, learning and encouraging change. We launched Google+ pages, worked with inspiring social influencers, and created a number of impactful social programs, including sweepstakes, games, the Summer Movies Popcorn Giveaway, and programs that supported exclusive live events, like the Twilight premiere and the Clinton Foundation Concert.

The year has been a lot of work, but also very rewarding. Yahoo! has been smart about using social media as a key part of the strategy to extend and enhance its properties and programs, and I’m proud to be a part of the team that created social experiences that touched millions of people.

Thank you and happy New Year!  I can’t wait for what’s in store in 2012.

Francine Kizner
Social Marketing Program Manager @KizzieFK

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.

Back in September at Facebook’s f8 conference, we announced the Yahoo! News activity feature, putting your friends front and center in our U.S. Yahoo! News experience. And to our delight, more than 12 million of you have given it a try so far, discovering news stories and sharing what you are reading on Yahoo! with all your Facebook friends. Many of you who love to share your reading activity are young and socially-engaged (no surprise!), and this has quickly impacted the virality of Yahoo!’s content on Facebook, as demonstrated in their recent post about the most shared stories of 2011, showing that 12 of the 40 most shared stories this year came from Yahoo!. In business terms, we’ve seen traffic increase from Facebook to Yahoo! News more than300%.

Based on this success, we’re expanding this nifty Facebook integration to 26 more Yahoo! sites worldwide, including Yahoo! News sites spanning the globe from India to Brazil, Singaporeto Spainand beyond – and we’ve recently added it to US-based entertainment experiences, omg!, Yahoo! TV, Yahoo! Movies, and Yahoo! Games as well. The features are designed to bring a deeply personalized, social news experience to more of the content millions of people come to Yahoo! to read each day.

To build on this increasingly social content experience, an additional social feature, Notifications, has also launched in the US, alerting people to social conversations and other activity on Yahoo! that interest them such as feedback on reviews, responses to comments, and stock alerts. Notifications is found on the top of the page across most pages on Yahoo!, such as Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, omg!, Shine, and Yahoo! Travel.

We think this relatively new mode of discovering, navigating and enjoying news – through the lens of our friends – is reflective of how the Web is evolving today, and we’re excited to help your Yahoo! experience become even more personal for you.

Enjoy!

Mike Kerns, vice president of social and personalization, Yahoo!

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

Yahoo!’s ‘You In?’ campaign set out to create a ripple of kindness around the world over the holidays by leveraging our vast community’s social networks. We encouraged people to update their online status with how they were helping others and a call-out for others to join them. For instance, someone shared “I just paid the toll fees for 20 cars behind me. You In?”.

Through this campaign, Yahoo! inspired over 320,000 people from 18 countries to do random acts of kindness and encourage their friends and family to do the same. People updated their status on the ‘You In?’ website, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Profiles, Yahoo! Mobile, Facebook and Twitter. They also shared hundreds of photos and videos of their random acts of kindness on Flickr.

Congratulations to all the Yahoos who made this campaign a success!

If you have any questions, you can reach out to the Yahoo! for Good team at yahooforgood@yahoo-inc.com.

What does this mean for you? Very soon, you will be able to see your Twitter feed on Yahoo! just as easily as you use Yahoo! to consume all of the other great content you love from across the Web. Through today’s partnership, along with our recently announced Facebook relationship, Yahoo! is giving your online social life wings to help you stay in touch with the people and things you care about most across the Web. It’s part of our strategy to ensure that Yahoo! delivers the people and things that matter most to you!

Want to see your friends’ latest Twitter posts? Or update your Twitter feed with stories and content from Yahoo!? Or check out trending topics and public updates? You no longer need to stop what you’re doing to see what’s going on with your Twitterverse — you’ll be able to do it all from Yahoo!.

As part of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) to make the Web more open and relevant, we’re helping you zero in on what’s important to you:

• Coming Soon: Read your personal Twitter feeds directly from Yahoo!’s many products and properties, including the homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and others — anywhere you can see Yahoo! Updates across our network.
• Coming Soon: Update your Twitter status and share content from Yahoo! in your Twitter stream — we’ve made it even easier to share what’s going on with your friends and followers on Yahoo! and Twitter.
• Coming Soon: Whenever you produce social actions on any website (like comments on articles, ratings, buzzes on Yahoo! Buzz) that you’ve allowed to appear on Yahoo! Updates, those actions can also be shared automatically with your friends on Twitter. (Pssst: Publishers and developers interested in learning more about Yahoo! Updates, including publishing directly into it or using Yahoo! Buzz or the Yahoo! Application Platform as ways of driving social traffic to your site, look here , here and here.
• Coming Soon: Yahoo! media properties like News, Finance, Entertainment, and Sports will include real-time public Twitter updates, allowing you to get a quick pulse-check on topics, trending and otherwise.
• Available Today: Yahoo! Search users will immediately see real-time Twitter results starting today.

The real-time Search integration is available immediately, with other features of the integration to be launched later this year. Go on, give it a test flight: Go to Yahoo! Search to check out how we just made your Web world smaller, yet larger at the same time.

Bryan Lamkin
SVP, Consumer Products Group, 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

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