• 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.

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Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

• Calendar gets cooler: Back in October, we brought you a Yahoo! Calendar revival. This week, it got a little louder. You can now search your calendar events and notepad by keyword, as well as print your calendar in a special print format for day/week/month/event for better readability. If you’re a list-maker, you can now create to-do lists by topic (i.e., “kids,” “work,” “groceries”) and share them with others. Not a to-do fan? Just drag the column shut to banish it. And finally, new right-click functionality lets you make quicker work of adding, editing, printing, and viewing events. Head to the suggestion board if you want to help steer future enhancements. Haven’t switched from Classic yet? What’s the holdup?
• Finer FoxyTunes: The popular music toolbar we acquired a year ago this week just got a refresh. The FoxyTunes team unleashed no fewer than 20 enhancements in their latest Firefox plugin release. They include a new switch menu that lets you multitasking music listeners jump between media players (iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody, etc.) along with a bevy of smarter, simpler improvements for menus, buttons, and an overall streamlined design. More here.

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• Steals and deals: OK, so you’ve lost 40% of your 401K in the last month. Doesn’t mean you have to join the Grinch in denying everyone of Who-hash and roast beast, does it? Yahoo! Shopping will help your heart grow a few sizes with its new Yahoo! Deals site. There you’ll find exclusive daily deals, online coupons for thousands of big-name retailers (you can even save them for later), discount codes for all kinds of storewide sales, and virtual weekly circulars for those who insist on subjecting themselves to holiday crowds. Because at least being thrifty is better than having the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile, right? More here.
• Calendar progression: The new Yahoo! Calendar Beta debuted a month ago and it’s already got a “new and improved” sticker. The team just released an update that addresses the most frequently reported issues, tunes up performance, and lets you switch back and forth between Classic Calendar and the beta. And they’re already hard at work on the next batch of features, including the top-rated requests from users via the Yahoo Calendar Suggestion Board. So weigh in if you want to get your feature on the roadmap.
• Venerable veterans: If you missed your chance to honor a soldier, sailor, airman or Marine (American and otherwise) for Veterans Day (which this year coincided with the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day, or the end of WWI), head over to the the Commons collection on Flickr to peruse its two newest members, the Australian War Memorial and the Imperial War Museum. Then check out all the photos tagged with Armistice Day for a fascinating look at the Great War. More here.

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• Snazzy schedule: Just like any tween, Yahoo! Calendar was worried about how it looked. So at age ten, it got a serious makeover, ushering this web calendar into a great new age of drag and drop, iCalendar integration, IM/SMS/email reminders, and Flickr loveliness. And coming soon are Outlook and iPhone synching and event discovery with Upcoming and other Yahoo! properties. Our little calendar — all grown up.
• Handsfree search: If you’ve got a certain BlackBerry or Nokia phone, it’s time to clear your throat. Voice-enabled mobile search is now available on multiple BlackBerry and Nokia devices. If you have one of a number of Nokia Series 60 phones (like the N95), you’ll find voice recognition in the home-screen shortcut of OneSearch 2.0 (get it here: m.yahoo.com/shortcut). And if you use Yahoo! Go 3.0 (get it here: http://get.go.yahoo.com/) and have select BlackBerry, Nokia Series 40, and Nokia Series 60 models, you’ll be able to find stock quotes, sports score, and just about anything else by simply yapping into your phone. And we know you know how to do that. It’s available in the US, UK, India, Singapore, the Philippines, and Canada.

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So why, you may ask, is Yahoo! launching a new Yahoo! Calendar after ten years and why will it be better than your paper calendar or (gasp!) your desktop calendar? Because we think the time is right for these Web-based scheduling applications to finally take off. Here’s why:

• Open standards like iCalendar and CalDAV make all online calendars work together so people can share their schedules without the hiccups of the past.
• Broadband and mobile device ubiquity means you’re always connected, even if you don’t like to admit it. You need your busy life to be in order and for your calendar to be accessible wherever you go.
• Web 2.0 technologies have made it possible to incorporate very cool visual effects and practical functions like event discovery.

Thanks to the powerful technology that our Zimbra team built, and our involvement with the online calendaring community, we’ve been able to add some much-improved technical functionality to the new Yahoo! Calendar. Now you can better connect with your friends and family –- even those who aren’t using Yahoo! Calendar. Our new calendar is interoperable with the other popular services, including those from Apple, Microsoft, AOL, Mozilla, and Google, so you can share your upcoming plans and important dates with friends.

With the new Yahoo! Calendar you can:

• Subscribe to any iCalendar-based public calendar and add upcoming events and show times to your Yahoo! Calendar. This means you’ll be able to plan for a local concert when your favorite band comes to town and you’ll know when the next new episode of “Lost” will air.
• Easily drag and drop events to reschedule appointments without having to refresh your Web page.
• Set email, IM or SMS reminders for important activities and never miss a birthday or anniversary again.
• Personalize your Yahoo! Calendar with interesting photos from Flickr to make your online calendar as visually appealing as it is productive.

And this beta is just the first in a series of updates you’ll see coming from us. Imagine being able to download your favorite sports team’s schedule, your class schedule, or your child’s t-ball schedule and being constantly on top of everything. That’s coming soon, along with additional event discovery features, including integration with Upcoming.org and other Yahoo! properties. And soon your Yahoo! Calendar will even auto-synch with Outlook and your iPhone.

So if you’re looking to be even more connected with your friends and family and never miss an important appointment, sign up for the Yahoo! Calendar beta at http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com. We’ll be adding users from this list over the next few weeks. And check out this screencast of the new Yahoo! Calendar, narrated by our product manager Herbert Wang.

John Kremer
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail