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

Today’s announcements include the following partnerships and product enhancements:

Share More With a Social Dimension Everywhere on Yahoo!

Yahoo! Messenger Beta – With the new Yahoo! Messenger Beta available today, people can now play social games from publishers like Zynga, ELEX and OMGPOP, share their status across networks, and view, comment on, and “like” updates from Yahoo! Pulse, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter – all from their instant messaging client. Interoperability with Facebook Chat also broadens the group of friends that people can instantly connect and chat with on Yahoo! Messenger. To get the new version of Yahoo! Messenger, visit here and click “Download Now.”

Yahoo! Contributor Network – Announced yesterday, Yahoo!’s new platform enables people to reach an audience of millions by publishing their fresh and authentic content on Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Contributor Network is an evolution of the Associated Content platform and will bring contributions from more than 400,000 writers, photographers, and videographers to the Internet’s largest media destinations, including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, and even the Yahoo! homepage, among many others. For more information, see here.

Zynga – Starting this week, the first phase of integration with Zynga will allow people to launch, play, and share Zynga’s popular games like Mafia Wars and FishVille on Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Games, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Toolbar, and Yahoo! Pulse.

Twitter – Building on Yahoo!’s Facebook integration, people can now also connect their Yahoo! and Twitter accounts globally to see and share Twitter updates on the Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Pulse.

Discover Local Treasures With Yahoo!

Local Offers – Yahoo! is launching its Local Offers program with more than a dozen partners to provide a wide selection of local deals, coupons, and other offers – from nearby spas, restaurants and other local retailers. Currently in limited beta in the U.S., Yahoo!’s Local Offers program will make it easy for millions of people to find the best local deals and savings on Yahoo!. Launch partners include Groupon, LivingSocial, Gilt City, BloomSpot, BuyWithMe, DealOn, Zozi, CrowdSavings, Lifebooker, FreshGuide, Scoop St, Goldstar, HomeRun, Tippr, Coupons.com, and Valpak, with more partners to come.  For more information, please see the press release here.

Local Search Enhancements – Locally relevant “Quick Apps” will empower people to find restaurants they want and take action on things they discover in a more productive Yahoo! Search. Apps launching later this week include a new and improved Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search for visually zeroing in on a street or neighborhood to find local restaurants – now available across connected devices, including PCs, iPhones, and iPads.  Other new apps will enable easy comparisons of local restaurants and let people make reservations through OpenTable right on the Yahoo! Search results page.  For more on these and other Yahoo! Search enhancements launching this week, visit the Yahoo! Search Blog.

All of these new features are built on Yahoo!’s cloud and technology platforms, allowing for in-depth partner integrations and broad distribution across Yahoo!’s consumer products. For example, the integration with Zynga is enabled by the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), which facilitates easy social sharing of game notifications across Yahoo!’s massive audience.

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)

Koprol allows people to connect and share photos, reviews and additional information about locations in real-time using just their mobile phone browser, making the service accessible to a larger percentage of mobile users. The addition of Koprol to the Yahoo! family will extend Yahoo!’s social and mobile offering in this emerging market.

We caught up with the founders of Koprol.com in Jakarta to discuss this exciting acquisition. Take a look.

For more details, refer to our official press release.

Today that vision takes another important step forward. We’re officially cutting the ribbon for talented developers everywhere, who are now welcome to come in and access our tools and data so they can build applications for a more customized, social, and relevant Yahoo! network and beyond.

I won’t bore you with the plumbing — you can head over to our developer network for those details — but let me summarize the potential impact on you the user as developers dig in and begin to build their applications.

Most obvious will be the social aspects. At a high level, we’re rolling out a social platform that will draw on the hundreds of millions of connections on Yahoo! – everything from random encounters with someone who commented on the same photo as you, to deep connections you have with friends who know nearly everything about you. By using the social contacts you already have on Yahoo! — through Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Finance, Fantasy Sports, etc. — we’ll make those social connections more active and useful. Most importantly, by enabling developers to make your social connections specific to the Yahoo! service you’re using, we believe you’ll enjoy some incredibly unique and creative new experiences that we would never have thought of.

There’s really no limit to the potential, but here are a few examples:

• Share updates and discover new things online: You’ll be able to see what your friends are doing on Yahoo! (like entering ratings on Yahoo! Movies or buzzing articles on Yahoo! Buzz) and off our network (like the blog post they just commented on, photo they’ve uploaded, movie they’ve rented, or the restaurant they just reviewed). And on the flip side, you can share your activities with them, helping them stay in touch with you more easily. Basically, we’re letting developers centralize anything you do on the Web as an update on our platform — with your explicit permission, of course. And it will be that much easier to discover great new things through the people and relationships most relevant to you. (Who knew that Uncle Jim loved “When Harry Met Sally” so much?) And publishers love this because they get exposed to more visitors whose friends implicitly recommend their content.
• A universal profile: We’ve begun the process of consolidating everyone’s Yahoo! experience onto a new, single profile so that everyone has a control panel — a central place where they can manage the new “open” applications that they decide to use and the social connections they have across Yahoo!.
• Make your Address Book truly portable: You can make your address book available to an online merchant so you can more easily ship friends a gift, or be reminded when it’s time to send them an online birthday card. Even beyond the Address Book, we’ve built the whole system with the mentality that any personal data that you put into Yahoo! is inherently your data; you own it, and you can give it to anyone or take it anywhere you would like.
• Customize Yahoo! like never before: Want to track your eBay auction? Is CNN your favorite news outlet? What’s next in your Netflix queue? Pull them all into the Yahoo! homepage so you can see everything that’s important to you in one place. We’ll open select properties like My Yahoo!, Mail and our front page so that you can let third-party applications become part of those sites as you see fit.
• Find and connect with new people: Based on whom you already know and interact with — on Yahoo! and off — we’ll make suggestions for more people to add to your social circle. And we’ll help you prioritize all of your connections, particularly as they communicate with you in Yahoo! Mail.

We’ve done all of this in a way that keeps Yahoo! as safe and secure as ever, while also building in full privacy and permission control so you’ll have complete control over things like what you broadcast publicly and what information you share with third-party sites, etc.

As of today, developers can start using our newly available data on their own web sites and even start deploying new applications into Yahoo!. You won’t find these externally developed applications built into your favorite Yahoo! service just yet — that’s coming soon. But starting today, you could discover new apps either by invitation from a friend or by noticing via your Profile or Messenger updates feed that a connection is using the app.

Reaching this step in our Yahoo! Open Strategy has been a significant effort, requiring hundreds of developers in offices around the world. We’ve even worked hand-in-hand with Google, MySpace, and many other of our traditional competitors as partners in this effort. We mean it when we say we’re open!

Like any initiative that thrives on the ingenuity of third party developers, we expect our open platforms to evolve and improve based on their feedback. This is very much an initial release. But we’re anxious to see what developers out there have up their sleeves and what you’ll do with it.

Jay Rossiter
Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Open Strategy

That’s why we’ve been hard at work integrating a new social foundation into Yahoo!. Today, as part of this, we’re upgrading profiles.yahoo.com with a new universal profile. Available in beta to all of our users around the world, Yahoo! Profiles is a centralized control panel that lets you manage your identity, activities, interests, and connections across Yahoo! — and eventually the entire Web. The new profile is a key element of our Yahoo! Open Strategy, rewiring Yahoo! to make it more open and social.

I want to make it clear that this new profile is not intended to be a new social destination on Yahoo!. Rather, our plan is to integrate “social” as a central dimension into the services you use every day. For example, if you’re on Yahoo! Messenger 9.0, you’re already seeing Yahoo! Buzz, Mybloglog, and Twitter updates as part of your friends’ status messages. Soon you’ll see social capabilities added elsewhere across Yahoo!, beginning with places where you start your day. The new homepage we’re testing will soon have an application that lets you stay up to date with what your friends are doing across the Web. And Yahoo! Mail will be delivering a smarter inbox, displaying emails from your most important connections first.

As you set up your new profile, you’ll see that we’re starting out with the basics. You can enter information about yourself (location, work experience, interests, photo, etc.) and add connections from your Yahoo! Address Book. As we start adding social capabilities to services like the Yahoo! homepage, Mail, and Messenger, your profile information will be used as the trusted source of identity and social preferences. This will be extended across the Web as developers begin using the open APIs we’re offering as part of our Yahoo! Open Strategy, allowing them to build more social experiences based on your preferences. (Note: The updated profile will not immediately be used by Yahoo! 360. More details are explained here.)

Ultimately, our goal is to unify your social experience and connections not only on Yahoo!, but anywhere you travel across the Web. Rolling out the new profile today is a just first step, and I look forward to sharing more details with you in the coming months as we “light up” social experiences at Yahoo!.

Jim Stoneham
Vice President, Communities