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.

Several weeks ago, we hosted the 2011 Yahoo! Global Partner Summit in New York City, where I had an opportunity to talk with—and learn from—many of the 300+ partners who attended. It was awesome to hear the diverse perspectives and to feel the love. At the Summit, Raymond Stern, SVP, Americas Partnerships and Business Development, said to our partners in his opening remarks, “We can’t succeed without you, and we believe—we know—that we can help you succeed too.” So simple and so instructive. This is how an ecosystem works, and partnering to create a vibrant ecosystem is—and always has been in the purple blood of Yahoo!.

We recently hosted more than 300 of our partners at the Yahoo! Global Partner Summit in New York City.

Our diverse roster of 2,300 partners come from all over the world and all parts of our industry: publishers who create premium content, device manufacturers who imagine the hardware of the future, service providers who connect customers to products, and advertisers who create immersive advertising experiences. When I reflect on our partnership ecosystem and how we want to evolve it, I’m struck by the scale of the opportunity before us.

We see the future of our digital world in the same way our partners do.

• Tremendous opportunity exists for all of us—another one billion users will enter the digital world by 2014. As our huge online audience gets even bigger, we’ll see advertising budgets, commerce, technology spend and the like follow users online at an even faster clip.
• An equal amount of complexity exists as the pace of innovation accelerates and our customers’ become more sophisticated. We all want experiences that are delightful, personal, and are never held hostage to one device or another. To do that, we in the ecosystem have to face the mind-boggling complexity of building for multiple browsers and thousands of different devices running thousands of OS variants, with apps distributed across more than 40 different app stores.

We’ve got some of the best tech in the world powering platforms for our ecosystem.

• CORE (Content Optimization Relevance Engine) is a super-charged suite of technologies that help us personalize experiences — for us and our partners. It curates personal interests from a vast pool of content that considers context, location, time, and social signals—and it delivers results. Engagement with the CORE-powered Today module on our homepage, for instance, has risen more than 200%. It’s impressive technology that continues to impress our partners. Fast Company was impressed, too.
• Our Hadoop cloud is the largest on the planet. It allows us to extract meaningful information from mountains of data—about 400 million events every 10 minutes. That’s the processing horsepower behind our and our partners’ products. And it is another in a long line of contributions we’ve made to the open source community to help our industry evolve (e.g., OpenSocial, OAuth).
• Right Media Exchange is helping Yahoo! become the best value for advertisers. Want to talk scale and reach? Right Media is the world’s largest global display advertising exchange – every day, RMX generates more than 9 billion ad impressions through its 300,000 buyers and sellers in more than 90 countries. We are the premier partner for delivering great advertising experiences and our advertising partners continue to affirm our leadership. For instance, nearly every major newspaper in the U.S. has agreed with their feet by working with us as part of the Newspaper Consortium.

We’re continuing to build kick-ass product experiences to give our partners massive reach.

• The Yahoo! homepage reaches more than 365 million customers around the world on any device they use. We combine assets with partners like AT&T in the U.S., Tata DoCoMo in India and BT in the UK to help us all increase engagement with customers. For AT&T alone we’re engaging their users with more than five billion page views each month. Better engagement means increased loyalty and revenue. We’re taking many of the technologies I mentioned above, combining them with premier content from our publishing partners and packaging them in a beautiful experiences—like the tablet experience called Livestand we’re launching later this year or the news sites we launched with ABC News.
• Our partnerships with Facebook and others are making the Web more personal. We combine our premier content with what we understand about our customers’ interests to create a deeply personal—and very engaging experience. For similar reasons, we also worked with Twitter to integrate its content into our experiences across the Yahoo! network. Bringing those experiences into Yahoo! has been great for us, great for our partners and, of course, great for our shared customers.
• Yahoo! Mail is a powerful platform with a huge, engaged audience and a great asset for our partners. Today, we have more than 60 million customers worldwide using our partner version of Yahoo! Mail. We have deeply integrated with partners like Apple and Nokia to create seamless on-device experiences.  We’ve even cleverly integrated Yahoo! Mail directly onto MediaTek’s chipsets for mobile devices.

We take pride in being a great partner and a valuable participant in the digital media ecosystem. We’ll keep fighting to be the best in the industry.

Keep yodeling,
David Covell
Senior Director, Product Marketing

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.

The addition of the IntoNow technology will enable Yahoo! to provide enhanced media experiences and video programming, bolstering its social engagement across the Yahoo! network and on all screens. IntoNow users are able to easily engage with friends around the shows they enjoy most. The application helps people discover new shows, discuss favorites with friends and learn more about them, and provides recommendations for what is currently airing based on their interests and those they are connected to. The application is also integrated with Facebook, Twitter, iTunes and Netflix to enable more sharing and information gathering.

Scroll down Santa’s Beard and see what fun surprises Yahoo! has in store for you this holiday season.  From the Gingerbread Man to a polar bear looking for warmth, Santa’s Beard is a haven for all sorts of goodness, including some fun video surprises.  And in the spirit of giving during the holiday season, you can share Santa’s Beard of Joy with friends on Facebook and Twitter!

What will you discover in Santa’s Beard of Joy?  Start exploring now at http://www.beardofjoy.com!

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.

For hundreds of millions of people around the world, email is a critical part of their online communications, connecting them to the people who matter most to them. With that in mind, we are rolling out Yahoo! Mail Beta — a faster, safer, more personally meaningful communication experience – seamlessly across PC, mobile and tablet devices. Here’s what we focused on:

Blazing Speed: We’ve re-architected Yahoo! Mail Beta from the ground up to provide lightning-quick performance. It’s at least twice as fast as previous Yahoo! Mail versions, and significantly faster in key geographies. The Yahoo! Mail team has made several technological advancements to make this happen, from utilizing Yahoo!’s cloud technology to focusing on user-flow optimization. Check out our post on the YDN blog for more on the great technology that’s making this possible.

Reaching Everyone: There are even more ways to share your stories with the people who matter most to you in Yahoo! Mail Beta – no matter what device or what service they use. We’ve added Twitter integration alongside Facebook, as well as richer IM and SMS experieneces, offering you more ways to share directly from your inbox. You can tweet or retweet or send a text message out to friends while pulling together an email.  And you can also easily check out photos and videos from Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube via a new feature that automatically shows slideshows right in your emails when your friends send you links from these sites.

Simple yet Powerful Search: When you’ve got unlimited storage (as you do with with Yahoo Mail) – you have a lot of email!  Our new search interface helps you get the messages you need quickly and easily.  You have the power of sophisticated searches at your fingertips, allowing you to sort and refine by sender, attachment file, date, or folder location.

Stay Safe From Spam: We all know spam is incredibly annoying; it can also be malicious. That’s why we’re proud to be No. 1 in spam protection, blocking over 130 billion spam messages each month. And Yahoo! Mail Beta gives you an even better spam-free mail experience by leveraging the power of Hadoop technology to keep you one step ahead of the spammers.

Take it With You: With this new communications experience, we’re making sure your encounters will be equally fabulous whether you’re emailing from your laptop, iPhone, iPad or Android device. No more relearning how to get things done each time you switch from one connected device to another.

So wherever you are in the world, check out Yahoo! Mail Beta now – a single speedy, simple, safe, and seamless stop for all your online communications.  We’ll be making lots of enhancements and improvements during this beta period, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback.  For more details about Yahoo! Mail Beta, visit the Yahoo! Mail blog, and to find out about related policy updates, check out the Yahoo! Policy blog.

- Kakul Srivastava, vice president of product management, Communications and Communities

In conjunction to the Web site, we’re launching the Yahoo! Social Bike iPhone app, which can be downloaded from the iPhone App Store.  The app allows Brazilians to instantly share photos, videos and bike routes across social networks including Twitter, Facebook and Meme do Yahoo!, while cycling. The free Yahoo! Social Bike App will also display the distance ridden and performance information.

Yahoo! will donate purple bike racks to the city of São Paulo when @social_bike on Twitter reaches three thousand followers and Yahoobrasil´s Facebook profile reaches one thousand fans.

All comments being tracked with the hashtag: #socialbike

…and a special thank you to local bike brand Houston for designing the all purple Yahoo! customized and exclusive bike.

André Izay

Yahoo! Brazil

As I’ve learned more about the people and products that make Yahoo! great, I’ve grown even more positive that our future will be a bright one. Our products continue to evolve — and at the heart of that evolution is our commitment to bringing personal meaning to the Web for everyone. In short, that means helping you and the other 600 million people on Yahoo! cut through the vastness of online data by providing the experiences that are most important to you — whether that’s instantly finding the content you are searching for or connecting you with family and friends.

Key to creating these experiences for you, and adding value for advertisers and partners, is our constant technological innovation of products like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Search, as well as our mobile sites, tablet and Connected TV experiences, and content properties like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! Sports. You’re using these products every day, and starting this fall, you’ll see more frequent updates for them. Check out our live webcast to watch this morning’s “Yahoo! Product Runway” media event, which we’re hosting in Sunnyvale:

While you can’t always see “under the hood” as a consumer, you should know that we’re delivering a number of planet-scale technology components to make it all possible. For example, we have built our products on global platforms and one of the world’s largest cloud computing infrastructures. What this means for you is more features and enhancements for the products you love — sooner and more often.

Some of the updates you can expect to see this fall include:

• A new Yahoo! Mail experience with even more focus on performance and speed
• New Yahoo! Search experiences with rich, immersive results that keep you in the loop on the news and entertainment topics that matter to you the most
• Twitter integration on Yahoo! that will allow you to link your accounts so you can view and share updates with friends across both networks
• A new Yahoo! app for iPad and other tablets that’s designed to deliver personally relevant news, information, and essentials like weather, commute updates, and more
• Customized Content Ads with creative formats that leverage an advertiser’s robust content and enable social sharing
• New Connected TV partnerships that provide consumers with thousands of video-on-demand content sources, social networks, games, music, shopping, and more — all while watching TV

Keep an eye out for updates to more Yahoo! products for consumers and advertisers in the coming months, including communication experiences, more social integrations, and improvements to our content offerings. At Yahoo!, our products are our babies. We create them, nurture them, and watch them grow to engage with hundreds of millions of people. Like any proud parent, we love them as they are — but we never stop trying to make them better.

-Blake Irving, EVP & Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!
@blakei

“It’s probably nothing…” they’d say. I wasn’t so sure. So I went to the doctor to make sure.

It wasn’t nothing. It was something. That something was Stage 3 Hodgkins Lymphoma. Cancer.

29 years old. New Job. Travel at a whim. Happy iPhone-toting Geek. Cancer.

I was scared. What did it mean? Was I going to die? Would the iPhone soon have a front facing camera? These are all things a 29 year old happy-go-lucky Geek would think.

I didn’t die. I had to fight, though. And boy, did I fight.

First things first, create a website where people could blame my cancer for anything that bothered them by sending tweets using the hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Check! Second, try to find someone to match $1 for every person who blamed my cancer. Drew Carey? Sure, why not? Check!

It’s been a crazy year and a half. A scary one, an enlightening one, and one that I not only survived and fought back on, but I won. We all did.

Now what? We raised a bunch of awareness, showing that ANYONE can get Cancer at ANY TIME. Not just grandma, not just smokers, ANYONE. Now we just need more cool organizations like LIVESTRONG, which helped me tremendously during my battle and fundraising, to continue the battle. Oh, and another Drew Carey. Check!

Stand Up To Cancer and Yahoo! have teamed up to do something awesome. With ONE Facebook like of their omg! page they will donate ONE dollar to help Stand Up To Cancer fund cancer research. Up to $100k. Easy, huh?

Do it. Let’s show Cancer who’s boss.

-Drew Olanoff, @thatdrew, @drewscancer

Drew’s is just one story – one story with a big impact. But it seems that everyone has been touched by cancer in one way or another. 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women will get cancer in their lifetime. We want to help change those statistics.

Today, Friday, September 10^th your favorite celebs will join forces to raise funds for Stand Up To Cancer. We’re broadcasting the show in a live stream on omg!, starting at 4:30PM Pacific- Watch the live stream.

To help further support this great cause, Yahoo! has pledged $1 for every “like” to the omg! Facebook page up to $100,000.

You can help, too. “Like” the omg! Facebook page, and share the link with your family and friends on Facebook, Twitter, and the other ways you like to share. By doing so not only will you get the latest updates on celebs from the #1 celeb site, you’ll also help fight this deadly disease.

There’s not enough room here to go into all of the insights Yahoo! Labs has published and presented this year – that’s what our website is for, and we highly recommend you check it out  – but to give you an idea, we recently discussed more than 25 papers at the ACMSIGIR and ACMKDD international research conferences in July. You’re not familiar with information retrieval and knowledge discovery? No worries. Here are a few highlights that will give you a feel for our work:

• Automatic Construction of Travel Itineraries Using Social Breadcrumbs: Every minute, thousands of images are uploaded to Flickr. In this study, the images and associated meta-data (like time stamps and geo-codes) became “social breadcrumbs” that Yahoo! Labs scientists used to create a roadmap to some of the world’s most popular intra-city travel itineraries, including Barcelona, London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco.

• Twitter Under Crisis: Can We Trust What We RT?: Yahoo! scientists examined Twitter usage during the 2010 Chilean earthquake, focusing on users’ differentiation of false rumors and legitimate news. The conclusion Yahoo! Labs scientists found was that users questioned the alleged rumors, almost self-regulating the truth of each other’s assertions, which shows that social networks may have the potential to correct their own mistakes.

These are just a couple, but I hope they pique your interest. There’s a lot to learn out there, and what we collectively know about the Web is changing every day.

In addition to publishing research papers and working with the academic community, Yahoo! Labs works very closely with product and engineering teams here at Yahoo! to continuously innovate and make sure our products – like Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, the Yahoo! Homepage, Search and many more – are using the latest scientific ideas and breakthroughs. So even if you’re not familiar with the latest algorithms for calculating the relevance of a website, there’s no doubt: Almost every second you spend with Yahoo! is one that’s been improved, in some way, by Yahoo! Labs.

For example, we use a technology we call content optimization that was developed in Yahoo! Labs. This helps to decide which stories will be featured in the Today Module on our homepage. All kinds of variables are factored in, from which stories seem to be gaining in popularity around the Web at that time, to what topics might be relevant to your local area and what news is about to take off, based on the years of experience and expertise of our editors. All of these factors and more get computed constantly at Yahoo!, and with that data we’re customizing your homepage, serving as many as 32,000 different versions  every five minutes. You get to see the page that’s most interesting to your world, and so does everyone else — it’s all based on science.

If you’re curious about the identities of these mad scientists working to make your Yahoo! experience better and more intuitive, here’s an up-close view from Science Week:

As you can see, they’re normal folks just like you and me. They’re just really obsessed with the science of the Web.

You can see more photos from Science Week by checking out our Flickr stream. And you can track all the innovations and interesting projects from Yahoo! Labs by following our Twitter feed.

-Prabhakar Raghavan

Yahoo! Chief Scientist and Head of Yahoo! Labs

*A new study details which parent is more likely to keep a watchful eye on their kids online behavior

*Yahoo! Fantasy Sports-women launching leagues of their own as the boys of summer heat things up

*Yahoo! Connected TV brings TV Widgets to more than 100 countries around the world

About The Yahoo! Digital Media Bureau:

The Yahoo! Digital Media Bureau is a team of Emmy-nominated, multi-platform content creators who innovate and produce original video content, from webisodes to webumentaries. The Yahoo! Digital Media bureau is responsible for the weekly feature, Yahoo! News Bytes, which peels back the layer on everything Yahoo! The Bureau also produces the weekly Yahoo! Trends segment, which focuses on what’s trending in entertainment, pop culture and tech. Yahoo! Trends is distributed on broadcast television and seen throughout the United States.

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and Yahoo! Sports is the #1 destination, reaching more than 20 million users each month-it makes perfect sense to team up with the world’s leading soccer star-David Beckham.  Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced David Beckham would be Yahoo!’s global football ambassador throughout the World Cup. Beckham will be featured in our marketing campaign, provide content for Yahoo!’s World Cup site, tweet and post Yahoo! content on his Facebook page, judge a World Cup Flickr photo contest and more.

And at the conclusion of the Tournament, Yahoo! will host a live global press conference/Q&A with David Beckham in London, which will allow fans from around the world to ask questions of the superstar!  Finally, for several months following World Cup he will be a featured analyst for Yahoo’s football coverage as the world makes the transition back to the regional leagues and competitions.

Yahoo!’s World Cup program is a true global, integrated marketing campaign. It includes live kickoff events in various cities around the world, fun ways to share with your own social networks, a cool online interactive global game to play and a chance to WIN the first-ever Yahoo! Sports Pass (the ultimate prize for sports fans!).

This month, we have also begun launching even more exciting elements of Yahoo!’s campaign.  Our campaign is digitally led with a huge focus on and off the Yahoo! network across all segments with, of course, online activation as one of the major drivers to show the power it has to drive business and build brands.  We will execute a dynamic takeover of the homepage on June 17th illustrating Yahoo! properties in a 3D experience–entertaining, engaging and inviting users to make the web their own with Yahoo!.

Our TV spots, developed for video use on the Web as well, hit screens this week on MTV, VH1 and Comedy Central.  The “Entertainment” spot was also featured on the Glee finale!  Our campaign is cohesive and impactful, communicating one idea-Yahoo! brings Your World together with The World.  We’re continuing to focus on driving deeper engagement through unique demonstrations and trials of our products.

On the cusp of the launching the next release of our campaign, our creative advertising agency, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners has received some very special recognition in the industry. Not only have they been named “Agency of the Decade” by AdweekMedia, but recently, at the CLIO Conference Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein were honored with the CLIO Lifetime Achievement Awards, one of the most prestigious honors in advertising. It recognizes outstanding and ongoing contributions of individuals who lead the industry and gives public recognition of something that we already knew — that we’ve got some of the world’s most talented creative partners helping us continue to build the Yahoo! brand.

Here is a preview of the actual ads that you will start to see in major cities soon:

Look for lots more great stuff to come!

Elisa Steele, EVP & CMO, Yahoo!

At Yahoo!, we’ve been helping you get your game on with online board games, video games, card games, and more on Yahoo! Games, as well as lots of other fun stuff like fantasy sports competitions — and we just couldn’t just stop there…

Today, we’re announcing a partnership with Zynga the developer of hit social games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Fishville. In the coming months, you’ll be able to play your favorite Zynga games in multiple places across Yahoo! like the homepage, Games, My Yahoo!,  Messenger, and many others sites, using your Yahoo! ID.

So get ready for some exciting and engaging new titles coming to Yahoo! that you can easily play with your friends, family, and fellow gamers and share with your networks across Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga!

For our developer friends,  this means Zynga will be deeply integrating its apps onto the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), Yahoo!’s OpenSocial container, helping to optimize Yahoo!’s distribution channels in ways that other developers can also take advantage of. There will be a set of new open notification channels and other benefits for developers coming to YAP soon!

In the coming months, you will be able to come on over and get your game on with Yahoo! and Zynga!

Cody Simms, senior director, Yahoo! Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN)

I for one say “no” to a guilt-ridden, obligation-filled Earth Day.  Instead, let’s have some fun!  That’s what we’re striving for with our Yahoo! Earth Day program.  On our Earth Day microsite and Yahoo! Search, we’re highlighting some of Earth’s biggest puzzles.  Ever wondered why ladybugs have spots?  Or what’s the world’s only immortal animal?  You can find the answers to these questions and more using Yahoo! Search or by visiting earth.yahoo.com.

We’re also featuring common things people search for such as how to turn your old electronics into cash and global warming myths and facts.  And just to balance out all the noise about what we should do, we’re highlighting the five things NOT to do for Earth Day.  Bet you didn’t know that organic isn’t always the best.

The Earth doesn’t really care about national borders, so we’re excited that 22 countries around the world are helping raise awareness of Earth Day by changing their Yahoo! front page logos and linking to relevant Earth Day information.  Our employees are getting into the spirit of fun, too.  Seventeen offices around the globe are holding celebrations.

For instance, in our Sunnyvale headquarters, we’re holding a Search Off where employees will challenge each other to find answers to one of a hundred green trivia questions using Yahoo! Search.  The first one to find the answer wins an eco-friendly prize.  Everyone at the celebration gets free gelato – green tea, pistachio, or mint-chip (because they’re all green!).

And here at Yahoo!, we agree that Earth Day shouldn’t be just one day.  That’s why we’re proud to run the #1 environmental destination on the Web:  Yahoo! Green.  Every day of the year, you can find ways to improve your life and the world.  We also have a vibrant Twitter and Facebook community so you can keep up with the buzz every minute of the day.  We even held a lively Twitter Party (#YEarth) earlier this week where people could ask and answer questions about being green.

Now I’m off to find out if earthquakes are really on the rise or if it just seems like they are.  I hope you’ll join me at http://earth.yahoo.com or follow us on Twitter at @YahooGreen

-Erin Carlson, Director of Yahoo! Green

*Ranking of green sites based on Comscore, March 2010 data.

Facebook and Twitter—those sure weren’t around when I was playing in the Championship game 20 years ago against Duke. I’ll never forget the thrill of that victory, all the memories from the entire season, playing alongside Stacey Augmon and Larry Johnson—broken jaw and all.

I’m not on the court anymore, but that’s one of the beautiful things about the NCAA Championship Tournament: With every correct pick, every upset we call, every favorite team that advances, we (the fans) get to share in the thrill. One million dollars certainly doesn’t hurt, either—which is what Yahoo! is offering one lucky fan for submitting the perfect bracket. No perfect bracket in the end? No problem. The best bracket in the KFC- sponsored Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick ‘em contest wins $10,000 (just ask Michael Lemon—he’s been enjoying his winnings from last year), and there’s even a second-chance contest from TIAA-CREF for the majority of us that must reluctantly accept our busted brackets.

Starting today, on-the-go fans will have access to a great new mobile experience for staying on top of their bracket selections. Yahoo! has created a mobile site where fans can play the Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick’em game right on their mobile device at m.yahoo.com/tourneypickem. In addition, they’ll be able to get live scoring, game stats, updated schedules, news, and expert analysis from the Yahoo! Sports editorial team.

And it’s even easier these days to get your friends involved (and we all know the real satisfaction comes in beating that one friend who is so sure he’s going win) with Facebook and Twitter integration. Plus, you can be a die-hard fan without having to invest all the time and research. Yahoo!’s Bracket Wizard and Scenario Generator help fans with those quick decisions and allow them to see at a glance which teams to cheer for along the way to ensure that big W.

One of the perks of being a member of the Yahoo! Sports team is that I get to pitch in and offer my best (and presumably spot-on) advice to the masses. For those last-minute updates, fans can tune in to Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Bracket Live, a live and interactive web-show from the folks who brought you the Emmy®–nominated Yahoo! Fantasy Football Live. Tune in on March 17 as Jason King, Brad Evans, Larry Beil and I give you a final rundown on all the immediate updates affecting your teams. Viewers can even send us their bracket, and there’s a chance we’ll help you out with it on our show.

I know you guys are as excited about the next few weeks as I am. If you haven’t already, you better get in the game soon. Tip-off is only 8 days away, and it can’t get here soon enough!

-Greg Anthony, Yahoo! Sports College Basketball Analyst

We’ve dedicated an entire section of Yahoo! Movies to this year’s awards show with the idea that Yahoo!’s Coverage of the Oscars starts with you! Let your voice be heard and make sure to cast a vote in our poll: “What do you want to see most when you watch the Oscars?” As of right now, 43% of you want to see who wins the big awards. You can also weigh in on who you think deserves to win Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director.

Interested in seeing what the stars are wearing? We’ve got you covered with our Oscars Photo galleries including fashion photos from the red carpet, insider photos from the before and after parties, photos of the nominees, and photos from the many events taking place Sunday.

We also have a Featured Videos section, a News section, and an ongoing Oscars Blog.

Coverage of the 82^nd Annual Academy Awards is already underway with both OMG! and Yahoo! News feeding into the Oscars frenzy.

Want to be the best informed on this year’s likely winners and losers? We’ve broken down the Academy Awards by category to help you get a leg up on your friends in picking who will win Oscar gold, in How To Win Your Oscars Pool.

Find out why Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Ali G/Borat/Brüno) went from being a presenter to sitting the award show out and watching from home!

Want an expert’s opinion? Who’s more suited to give Oscar picks than OUR favorite Oscar–namely Oscar the Grouch? Sesame Street’s seminal crab-apple took a few minutes to answer some questions on who he thinks the winners will be on Sunday. Check out Oscar the Grouch’s Oscar Picks.

Criticisms of this year’s hottest movies and highest contenders are outlined in Yahoo! News’ Controversies big and small dog Oscars contenders. Find out why there’s been outrage over Sigourney Weaver’s role in Avatar.

Red-carpet style predictions and fashion alerts are revealed in OMG!’s Glam Slam: Oscar Style!

Have your own opinion on the big winners and major upsets? Want to weigh in on some of the fashion wins and fails? Then we invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

On Facebook, be sure to check out the Yahoo! Movies fan page (Yahoo! Movies) where you can write captions to photos of your favorite celebs. We’ll be uploading fashion photos of the movie stars from the red carpet, and we’re asking you to submit your most witty captions via comment.

On Twitter, follow @YahooMovies for real-time info on Academy winners. Follow @YahooOMG for updates on fashion from the red carpet. Follow @YodelingMamas for a Mom-blogger’s point of view on the evening. And of course follow @Yahoo for an overall perspective.

See you on the red carpet–and may the best man, woman and picture win!

Key Scientific Challenges, Entry #5: Web Information Management

On January 27 we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program.  To highlight the scientific challenge areas included in the program, we launched a series of guest blog posts earlier this month on Yodel Anecdotal. Read our previous post on online advertising, “The Art and Science of Advertising.”

Another big challenge our Yahoo!’s research scientists are continually examining is Web Information Management. In this entry, Brian Cooper from Yahoo! Labs shares some thoughts on how Yahoo! is driving research into information management and why it’s a fascinating field.

A Torrent of Data
Sites like Facebook and Twitter demonstrate that users really like to know what’s going on with their friends. At the same time, the popularity of blog readers and personalized RSS aggregators like MyYahoo! and iGoogle show that users also like up-to-date news. Although social networking and content aggregation seem like different applications, at the core they share a key mechanism: collecting the most recent content from a set of producers, and distributing it to a set of consumers. In the case of social networking, producers write status updates or post links, and consumers (their friends) get a list of the updates. In a news aggregator, the producers are news sites or blogs, and the consumers are the readers that want the content.

The core mechanism that takes content from producers and redistributes it to users is actually quite hard to get right, and is an example of the really tough problems that fall under the Key Scientific Challenge area on Web Information Management (and its sub-topic Data Management)

The main problem is the multiplicative explosion of updates. Consider a popular user of a site like Twitter. Ashton Kutcher, for example, has over 4.5 million followers as of February 18, 2010. Every time Ashton tweets, his words of wisdom have to be propagated to the feeds of all those millions of followers. Even if the average user has far less followers, their tweets may have to be propagated to hundreds of users or more. Suddenly, even a short 140-character message can consume a lot of server resources. It’s for this reason that Twitter notoriously found it difficult to scale and stay up at the same time. Some of the challenges in doing so have been described by Twitter engineers.

At Yahoo!, we’ve been aggregating and distributing content for a long time, and we’re increasingly distributing social updates too. Products such as Yahoo! Mail and Messenger show you recent updates and activities by your friends on Yahoo!. Plus, services like Yahoo! Updates provide tools for developers to feed a variety of different user activities and updates that happen on their sites into Yahoo!’s products (and vice versa). As we build our infrastructure to support both content and user updates, we run into many of the same scaling problems that other companies have been reporting. To address these challenges, we took a step back and looked at the whole architecture needed to support these “user event feeds”.

The Push or Pull Dilemma
I’d like to talk about one aspect in particular, as it directly addresses the intersection of building Internet-scale databases and dealing with social data. When distributing updates from producers to consumers, you have a fundamental choice: should you “push” updates to consumers, so that when a user logs in their feed is already constructed and ready to go? Or should you wait until a consumer logs in, and then “pull” updates from producers to construct the feed on the fly?

Pull ensures that we construct feeds only for users that actually log in, but it has a downside: the time a user spends waiting for their feed can be quite long because the system needs to collect and sort all of the updates from all of the people or news sources that the user follows. Many sites face this tradeoff between doing potentially unneeded work to always be ready on the one hand, and the strain of delivering on demand performance on the other. Digg recently reported moving from a pull to a push model for one part of their site, resulting in a huge increase in the amount of “pushed” data that had to be stored, but a significant decrease in response time for users.

Threading the Needle
At Yahoo! Labs, when we thought about this problem and tried to figure out whether push or pull was best, we realized something that should have been obvious all along: neither push nor pull is best.

Consider a producer named Alice that posts a new status update once an hour. We need to include her updates in the feeds we produce for her friends. Thus, when her friend Bob logs in, he should see some of Alice’s recent events. But we only really need to show Bob some of his friends’ events, because there is only room on the screen to show him 10 at a time. Now imagine that Bob only logs in once a week. In that week, Alice may have produced 80 or more updates. If we pushed all 80 to Bob’s feed, at least 70 will have fallen off the front page (replaced by newer Alice events or newer events from other friends) by the time Bob logs in, and all the resources (network bandwidth, disk I/O, CPU time) spent on pushing those 70 updates would be wasted. Multiply that waste by millions of users, and you can see where this is heading.

Alternatively, consider Carl, another one of Alice’s friends. Carl loves to check his feed and updates it every five minutes (he’s an over-sharer). In this scenario, a push model makes more sense: rather than querying the database every five minutes for Alice’s updates, we should push Alice’s events to a pre-computed page for Carl, and just serve him that same page over and over until a new Alice event arrives and updates the page. That way, Carl’s experience is great for him AND no servers meltdown!

The key insight is that we should do push for some producer/consumer pairs and pull for others. Deciding whether to do push depends on the relative frequency of the producer’s events
compared to the consumer’s logins, as well as the relative cost of push versus pull. We can minimize resource usage by only pushing for producer/consumer pairs where the consumer logs in frequently enough that the cost of pushing, plus serving the pre-computed page, is less than the cost of retrieving the event repeatedly from the producer’s queue.

It’s a challenging model to develop and put into place. It can be complicated by an almost endless array of variables, and the challenge of implementing this approach in the midst of hugely popular events, like Barack Obama’s inauguration, or Michael Jackson’s death, which caused huge surges in status updates, makes it even more difficult. It’s also what makes it utterly fascinating.

More details about this challenge, the techniques, arguments and the real-world experiments we’re developing at Yahoo! Labs will be available in our upcoming SIGMOD paper, “Feeding Frenzy: Selectively Materializing Users’ Event Feeds” written by Adam Silberstein, Brian Cooper and Raghu Ramakrishnan, as well as Jeffrey Terrace from Princeton, who was an intern here at Yahoo! Labs last summer. You’ll be able to find the paper on the Yahoo! Labs site later this year and take a look.

Brian Cooper

Yahoo! Labs

How the trivia challenge works: We will post each of the 15 questions on our official Yahoo! Twitter account (http://www.twitter.com/yahoo) every hour, starting on March 2nd, 2010 at 8 AM PT. Each question will start with a question number, such as “Q1”, “Q2”, and so on. Find the answer to each question by using the link we provide to the Yahoo! site where the answer can be found. Tweet your response to @yahoo using the hashtag #Y15a. Start your answer with the letter “A” (for “answer”), and the number of the question you’re answering. So, for example, if you’re answering question 5, your reply should look something like:

A5 <this is your answer to Question 5> #y15a.

Easy enough? You can get one entry for each question you answer, for up to 15 possible entries in the challenge. You have until 8 AM on March 5, 2010 to get all of your answers back to us. After the challenge is over, we’ll select the winners from among all the eligible entries we received during the entry period.

What you are playing for: One Grand Prize winner will receive a Nikon Cool Pix S230 Yahoo! Camera and a Jawbone Earcandy Bluetooth Headset (ARV $305). Plus, four first prize winners will each receive a Mimobot Yahoo! USB flash drive. (ARV $20)

Anything else you should know? Our friend Matt the lawyer would also like you know that there’s no purchase necessary and the challenge is void where prohibited. The challenge is open to legal residents of the fifty United States, the District of Columbia, and Canada, excluding the Province of Quebec, who are 18 and older.

Happy hunting!

Start now by following us on Twitter: @Yahoo

For the complete list of rules, click here

We all know that the Web makes the world a much smaller place, and we have some great news to share today that will make your Web world smaller and easier, while at the same time expanding your social world online! We’re partnering with Twitter to integrate their real-time social experience into our global network.

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!

Earlier this summer, we created a fun way to let you analyze your “social mojo.” And just in time for the holidays, the birds are back to share a seasonal analysis of your Twitter persona. Simply go to yahoo.holidaymojo.com, add in your Twitter handle (aka username) and through a (not) very scientific process you can determine exactly what kind of twitterer you are based on how you use Twitter (no private stuff!).

Depending on your social mojo persona, we’ll recommend a few apps you can instantly add to your new homepage to make it more personally relevant. So, if you’re a Twitter user, give it a whirl – you might be:

• Snowflake – Drifting from here to there, no one is better at following people than you!
• Regifter – You’re great at passing on the retweets.
• Toast Master – You have a lot to say and take advantage of your 140 characters to say it!
• Mistletoe Magnet – You like to bring people together with all those hashtags.
• Snowman – Based on how rarely you tweet, you’re clearly the strong, silent type.
• Nutcracker – You’re so good at uncovering the best URLs!
• Gingerbread Man – All those followers make it clear that you’re quite sweet.
• Noise Maker – You like to keep the conversation going with all those @replies.

Check it out (or check it twice) – follow us on Twitter — we’re a Nutcracker.

• Look ma, no wires: Those who manage their lives via Yahoo! Calendar and own an iPhone will rejoice – you can now sync the two! Tapping into the CalDAV open standard, we’ve collaborated with Apple to let you bring all your precious deets into your iPhone Calendar. You can also share your calendar with friends and family and likewise see their events on your phone. Nothing to download, no wires — it’s all over the air. That’s mighty George Jetson. More here.
• Tweeting your tunes: The latest version of FoxyTunes is out and it’s all atwitter. FoxyTunes, the toolbar that lets you control tunes from within your browser, now lets you easily tweet about the music you’re listening to. A project started about two years ago, TwittyTunes is officially a new default feature within FoxyTunes. And remember, you have 140 characters, which is enough to tweet, “Listening to a song I love: The Dandy Warhols – The Legend of the Last of the Outlaw Truckers aka the Ballad of Sherif Shorty.” What’s more, you can also share your song via Facebook, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Last.fm, and Yahoo! Status. It’s a musical meetup. More here.

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

• Cheapskates rule: There’s nothing like nuked portfolios and pink slips to make couponing de rigueur. This recession has spawned a generation of proud penny pinchers who enjoy the hunt for great bargains, and the refreshed Yahoo! Deals makes that even more sporting fun. In addition to daily deals, weekly electronic circulars, and online coupons from major retailers, you can now find great local bargains with coupons for groceries and neighborhood stores. You can even share your dollar-saving discoveries through social tools like Twitter, Facebook, Digg and Delicious. Get your save on. More here.
• Trash talking mayors: Politics and fantasies should rarely mix. But mayors from 11 big football cities are letting their imaginations run wild as they pick their teams for the Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football Mayoral Face-Off. From San Francisco to Oakland, Green Bay to Buffalo, mayors are squaring off to see who can assemble the winning team. What’s in it for them? A check for $15,000 to benefit their favorite local sports charity. What’s more, the city with the most votes from football fans scores another $15,000. So go hit the polls now. More here.
• Measure your mojo: If you know how to retweet your @replies with a hashtag, you’re on Twitter. But do you know what kind of Twitter user you are? In celebration of the launch of our new Yahoo! Homepage, we’ve launched Know Your Mojo with a sophisticated pipe thingy that analyzes your account and spits out your social mojo. If you’re a Crowd Pleaser, you’re into hashtags. If you’re a BFF, you’re big into @replies. If you’re a Wall Flower, you seem to have forgotten how to type. We’ll also recommend what websites you should add to your own Yahoo! homepage to help feed your mojo. We’re a Concierge. More here.
• You’re two-faced: Speaking of customizing your Yahoo! Homepage, we’ve developed a Facebook quiz that acknowledges that there’s more than one side to each of us. In our Split Personality quiz, you’ll answer ten multiple-choice questions to determine whether you’re more like Tiger Hilfiger, Galileo Cronkite or Bono Rockefeller (etc.). And then we’ll suggest websites to add to your Yahoo! Homepage that match your dueling passions. What’s your split personality?

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

In honor of our new Yahoo! Homepage, which was designed to be customized to reflect your true personality, we’ve launched a new tool that helps you analyze your social mojo. Just enter your Twitter username and our highly scientific pipe thingy goes to work to determine exactly what kind of Twitter persona you possess. You might be a:

• Headliner – You’re the star of the Twitterverse, have tons of followers, and have retweets the likes of Ashton Kutcher and Perez Hilton
• Crowd Pleaser – You use lots of hashtags and are in on all the hot conversations
• Cheerleader – Retweeting is how you roll
• B.F.F. – Your volume of @replies makes you everybody’s best bud
• Party Animal – With so many followers, you’re the life of the party
• Private Eye – Like any good investigator, you’re following a boatload of people
• Concierge – You live for links and sending people to the best stuff
• Word Whiz – You’re a natural wordsmith and make the most of your 140 characters
• Lone Wolf – You’re more of a low-profile type (some might even accuse you of lurking)
• Name Dropper – You use lots of @names when you tweet
• Matchmaker – You pass along lots of URLs to make sure everyone’s connected
• Wall Flower – You don’t tweet much but you’re still in on the party
• Novelist – You have a lot to say and tweet with a lot of characters to prove it
• Shadow – You follow lots of people like a good shadow would
• Scenester – If there’s a hashtag conversation happening, you’re there
• Tweethead – Your high number of retweets shows you like to spread the good stuff

And once you get your assessment, we suggest a number of related websites that you can add to your very own Yahoo! Homepage to help feed your mojo.

Give it a try — http://yahoo.knowyourmojo.com… and then tweet about it. (And be sure to follow us on Twitter — we’re a Concierge.)

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

• Mobile home: As announced in February, we’ve collected all of our mobile offerings into one handy application called, succinctly, Yahoo! Mobile. And this week, it said “sayonara, beta!” You can now access Yahoo! Mobile for the Web on 300+ devices with HTML-enabled mobile browsers (http://new.m.yahoo.com/) or download the free Yahoo! Mobile app from the Apple iPhone App Store. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s open, so you not only get quick access to your favorite Yahoo! services (Mail, Messenger, News, Finance, etc.), you can check your Gmail, see Twitter and Facebook updates, read up on RSS feeds, and more. And, as an added bonus, iPhone users can also download Yahoo! Messenger. More here.
• Get a new image: Searching for an image? You might have noticed our spiffy new Yahoo! Image Search preview page, which is both prettier and more helpful. Click on that thumbnail of Vin Diesel and you get rewarded with a much larger image, along with thumbnails for other top image results and suggestions for related searches (ie, Dwayne Johnson, Brad Pitt, Paul Walker, etc.). More here.
• See attached: Yahoo! Groups is bringing back an old concept — the email attachment! Removed in 2003, we’re reviving this capability so Group members can share images and files and be able to retrieve them at a later date. That’s especially great news if you’re receiving digests. This new tool is currently in beta and will be rolling out to all groups over the next few weeks. Let the kitten photosharing begin! More here, including how-tos for moderators.
• On the Twitter sideline: Are you a Twitterholic looking for an easier way to monitor what’s being said about you or your brand? One of our engineers, playing around with Adobe AIR and the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), has created a nifty little desktop application called Sideline that lets you set up and save multiple tabbed search topics for Twitter conversations. Not bad for a side project. Take it for a spin here.

And, of course, don’t miss our new Ideological Search! ;-)

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

That said, there are many other Yahoo! Twitter accounts that went live before us, including @yahoo_directory, @yahoosearchdata, @yahoomovies, @yahoo_sports, @YahooNews, @yahoonews_odd, @Yahoogames, @YahooBuzz, @ymailblog, @yahoogroups, @delicious, @OneConnect, @YahooGeo, @YahooResearch, @ydn (Yahoo! Developer Network), @YUILibrary, and @ysearchFE (Yahoo! Search). Check them out.

I’m trying to decide if I like our Twitter page background — does it work, or is it aneurysm-inducing?

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

• Status on steroids: If you’ve set up your Yahoo! Profiles page, you’ve been reaping the benefits of Yahoo!’s new social capabilities. Today, Yahoo! Profiles ventures beyond these purple walls to include updates from more than 20 sites. That means that you can now see when a contact posts a new review on Yelp, uploads to SmugMug, uploads a video to YouTube, blogs on Blogger, rates a song on Pandora, or tweets on Twitter. The world’s getting smaller as we speak. More here.
• Piping hot news: What do you get when you combine Yahoo! News with Twitter? A breaking news search engine. Yahoo! engineer Vik Singh took his brainchild, Yahoo! BOSS (or Build Your Own Search Service), and put it to use to create what he calls TweetNews. It’s a clever mashup that takes stories on Yahoo! News and combines them with topics that are spiking on Twitter — a new way to find news that is both timely and important. And another great marriage of traditional and social media. Give it a whirl. More here and here.

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

• Your city is big time now: Ever been frustrated that your city doesn’t rank when it comes to online city guides? Seeth no more. Whether you live in Kailua, Kinnelon, Killingworth or Kennebunkport (or any large metropolis around the world, for that matter), you’ll find your city in the new Yahoo! Our City. It dynamically scrapes what’s available on the Net — Flickr photos, news, events, weather, videos, blogs, maps — and melds them together in a single comprehensive snapshot. The fruit of a Yahoo! India Hack Day winner, it’s a city guide of the people, by the people, and for the people. For every citizen around the world. More here and on their blog.
• MyBlogLog Tweets:The team at MyBlogLog is embracing the 140-character Web. They’ve launched their own Twitter account to help keep you up to speed on goings on, as well as make it easy for you to lob over comments and quick questions. So go follow MyBlogLog and don’t skip a beat. More here.
• Even hackers have taste: If you’ve spent time at the Yahoo! Developer Network in the past, you might have noticed its radical face lift. Not only does it have a clean new 21st-century look (we didn’t want to rush anything), it now has “improved navigation and information architecture built to meet the needs of the lazy and impatient developers” among you (their words, not mine). You’ll also find more timely content, with four content tabs about the latest and greatest at all times. There’s also an Upcoming events stream for rubbing elbows with Tech Yahoos and lots of YDN Theater goodness. We even used our own popular YUI library components to rebuild the site. It’s all about eating dog food around here.

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