Quick – who said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”? That’s right, Mahatma Gandhi and today would have been his 140th birthday. Take a little time to honor his legacy by celebrating justice, tolerance and creating change through nonviolent resistance. Here’s the kind of change we enacted this week:

• Homepage is more apptastic: If you’ve been playing with our new homepage apps, you’ve discovered our gallery of recommended apps. This week, we added more than a dozen new ones, with more to come. You can balance your personal budget with Mint, learn how to pair the right wine with your meal with an app from MyRecipes and Snooth, discover weekly deals at Target, get movie info from Flixster, or manage posts and comments on your WordPress blog — all from the Yahoo! Homepage. And because we’ve opened it up to third-party developers, expect that list to grow. More on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.
• New Yahoo! Search: Notice anything different about Yahoo! Search? After a month of testing, we’ve rolled out a brand new Yahoo! Search that ups the ante in personal relevance. You’ll see new tools that let you explore related concepts; display only results from popular Yahoo! and third-party sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and IMDB; and narrow results by types of content like people, videos, and discussion forums. We also give you quick access to our Search Scan/SafeSearch tool, to protect you from viruses, spyware and spam, and Search Pad, which lets you take notes during your queries. More on the Yahoo! Search blog.
• Yahoo! Messenger kills bugs dead: The bug hunters on the Messenger team have released new versions of both Yahoo! Messenger 10 Beta as well as Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone. In the former, they’ve fixed issues with webcam detection, added messaging to tell you when your friend needs to upgrade versions, offer better handling of unanswered calls, and explain when your Internet connection downgrades you to a voice call. Over on the iPhone, they’ve addressed the mysterious contact list disappearances. Download the upgrade in the iTunes App Store. More here and here on the Yahoo! Messenger blog.
• Zimbra milestone: Ok, what do Zimbra and South Africa have in common? People. Fifty million of them now have paid Zimbra mailboxes, just a bit more than the population of Africa’s most southerly nation That milestone comes amidst the launch of Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0, which now lets you more easily sync to your mobile, read and write emails with tabbed views, create presentations without external software, receive read email receipts, choose from among calendar views, and remotely wipe your phone if you lose it, among other features. More over on the Zimbra blog.

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Six years ago today, some unruly trees in Ohio plunged 55 million people into darkness during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. While inconvenient, it forced people out of high-rise apartments, neighbors bonded, guitars went acoustic, candles were lit, and there might even be a higher than average number of kindergartners this year. Here are our new beginnings from this week:

• 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

As Twitter becomes more mainstream, everyone and their mother (and grandmother… and mayor… and daytime TV host) is trying their hand at the tweet. But what they might not realize is that how you use Twitter can say a lot about you.

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

A lot went into the creation of the new Yahoo! Homepage. Not only did we test it until the cows came home (they’re home now), our developers pulled off significant feats of engineering to make it all work smoothly. While the page is simple, clean, and easy to use, there’s pretty sophisticated technology at work under the covers. Ask an engineer about it and you’ll hear references to things like machine-learned models, Hadoop, separating metadata from markup, giant JSON structures, YUI 3.0, intelligent squid-caching mechanisms, YDBM, MDBM, content optimization knowledge engine, adapter layers, and so on.

If you want to know what all that means, you’ll have to watch this video — now playing on the Yahoo! Homepage, starring just a handful of the many technical talents responsible for our spiffy new homepage.

Fortunately, it’s closed-captioned for the nerd-impaired.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

¡Ay, caramba! It’s National Tequila Day! Perfect excuse to ditch that rot-gut variety and broaden your horizons beyond sugary frozen margaritas and shooters from a waitress’ holster. Get to know the finer points of fermented agave and sip a snifter of top-shelf blanco, joven, reposado, añejo, or extra añejo. But don’t overdo it just because it’s Friday! (Pssstt. Figs are the new hangover cure.) Here’s what we slammed down this week:

• Home sweet home: We’ve remodeled the house but we’re letting you pick out the furniture. The new Yahoo! Homepage is here! And it’s all about you. Load it up with your favorite websites by choosing from one of more than 65 apps or adding a link of your own. Also, your news is now hyper-local and you can also toggle the main news module for more of the big news that matters. And you can take it all with you — PC to mobile sync is coming very soon. If you live in the U.S., you can opt-in today by visiting http://yahoo.com/trynew. Our friends in France, India, and the UK will soon have access to localized versions and we’ll start rolling out to other markets in the next month. Take a tour and read more here.
• Roadtrip photos: If you’re one of the many people who researches travel destinations by checking out online photos, you’ll start packing your suitcase when you see the new travel image refiner on Yahoo! Image Search. You can now take a virtual tour of popular points of interest when you search for a destination. Which Hawaiian isle is right for you? Search for Hawaii and click on the thumbnails for islands like Maui, Oahu, Kauai, and popular spots like Haleakala National Park and Waimea Canyon. Try it with Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Rome, Sydney, New York City, San Francisco, and beyond. More here.
• More mobile Messenger: Attention, iPhone users – the latest Yahoo! Messenger app update is out and it is spiffy. Now you can get notified of a new message even when the app is closed. Make that, even when your iPhone is asleep! You can choose whether you get an alert on your home screen, an alert sound, or a badge featuring the number of messages — or all three, or none. Another new addition – you can now stay signed in for up to two weeks. Again, that’s even when your app is closed. And finally, you can now BUZZ! your friends – one of the most requested features for the iPhone app. Ask and ye shall receive! More here.
• Back to class: Yep, it’ll soon be time to trade flip-flops for Mary Janes – school is right around the corner. But we’re here to ease the pain. Our new Back to School site helps you choose the right backpack, find green school supplies, get safety tips, find ways to cut down your back-to-school budget, and even adjust to a new school. We give you a roster of shopping bargains, like dorm room essentials, MP3 players, and student duds. There’s also a study zone with fun learnings, games, and cool Avatar gear for when the time comes to drop a school bus in your background. And if you’re tired of the same ol’ same ol’, there are great healthy school lunch recipes. In the meantime, make the most of those flip-flops!

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

It’s a huge day – for us and for you. After months of testing, listening, adjusting, and testing again, we’re ready to start rolling out a new Yahoo! homepage – one that is tailored to you and your interests like never before.

You’ll soon see for yourself. Starting today, anyone living in the U.S. can opt-in to the new page by visiting http://yahoo.com/trynew, and our friends in France, India, and the UK will have access to localized versions in the coming week. We’ll start rolling out to other markets in the next month.

This new launch represents the most significant change to our homepage since the company’s inception. Our new homepage has been built around the people who use it and we’ve made sure every pixel counts. Gone is the sea of links to Yahoo! products – that was really more about us than you. And you only used a handful anyway, so why not let you decide how to use that real estate?

You can now customize your Yahoo! homepage (with a click or two) and make it your own, bringing in your favorites websites, whether they’re from Yahoo! or somewhere else on the Web. That means there could eventually be more than 110 million individual versions of our homepage out there in the U.S. alone – with people adding content that could range from Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Finance, and omg! to Gmail, epicurious, NPR, The New York Times, Facebook, and much more. The sky’s the limit.

You’ll see and hear a lot more from us in the coming weeks about this new design, but here are highlights of what’s new:

• My Favorites – You can easily choose from a dashboard of more than 65 apps to add directly to your homepage, including different email providers (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail), best of breed content sites (Barron’s, NPR, omg!, USA Today), popular social networking sites (Facebook and MySpace), and dozens of others. These apps let you preview, interact with, or navigate to your favorite sites from one easy check-in point.
• App Maker – You can create your own app on the fly by adding virtually any URL of your choice.
• Trend Setter – A new trends snapshot lets you keep tabs on the most popular Yahoo! searches, insights from Yahoo! Buzz, and fun facts from around the Web.
• PC to Mobile Sync (coming soon) – Whatever new apps you add on your computer stay with you when you’re mobile.
• News, Your Way – Your news is now hyper-local and you can also toggle the main news module for more of the big news that matters.
• Social Updates – You can now share your current “status” with friends directly from the homepage, see what your friends are doing across the Web, and integrate with leading social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Over the years, we’ve evolved our homepage to help you simplify the Web and your life, which both only seem to get more complicated. (Did you know the average person in the U.S. visits 85 sites a month? Exhausting.) You’ve got your world to stay on top of and the rest of the world. Now you can do it all in one place and get more done, faster.

One other thing you’ll notice is that we’re now sporting a new purple logo, officially ushering in Yahoo!’s long-standing corporate color. The legacy red logo, chosen in 1995 because purple often resolved closer to blue or brown on old monitors and red popped better against our historically gray background, has been retired in favor of the color that is truly synonymous with Yahoo!.

Oh, and tremendous thanks to the millions of you who tested the site, told us what you loved and hated, tested it again, and guided us to this final design. Since we run one of the most trafficked sites on the Web, we don’t take changes lightly. Your experience drives everything we do and your feedback was invaluable. Thanks for letting us listen.

Learn more here and then go check out the new Yahoo! Homepage at http://yahoo.com/trynew. And here are some screenshots and photos of the site’s 15-year evolution.

Tapan Bhat
SVP, Integrated Consumer Experiences

We recognize that for many of you around the world, the Yahoo! homepage – whether you’re seeing it on a computer or a mobile device – is Yahoo!. And we know you all have vastly different interests and “must-see” places you navigate to online. We can make our homepage better reflect this reality and, as many of you know, we’ve been hard at work on improving both our mobile and Web homepages.

What’s new, you ask?
We recently made the new Yahoo! Mobile (http://m.yahoo.com) available on the mobile Web across more than 300 devices and as an Apple iPhone app – both are available in eight countries, with more launching soon. We’ve moved out of beta and are in the process of rolling it out as our default mobile homepage.

Like the PC homepage we’re testing, the new Yahoo! Mobile has a more feature-rich design, letting you bring together your favorite content and services from across the Web, making it more personally relevant. For example, my experience is customized with my Yahoo! Mail, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo! Messenger accounts, as well as my various stocks, favorite blog feeds, and weather from my favorite cities. The beauty of it is that you can customize the experience to exactly what you want and add anything to the page.

As for the Web, we recently started testing some new designs based on your feedback. We recognize that many of you like your homepage just the way it is, thank-you-very-much, so the overall look and feel of the page will be familiar. But take a closer look, and you’ll see that we’ve made some fundamental improvements and packed in features that are easy to use and easy to make your own – things you have told us you want.

The “My Favorites” area on the left side of the page includes an applications “dashboard” with the ability to preview, interact with or navigate to your favorite sites – whether they’re on Yahoo! or elsewhere on the Web. It’s all fully customizable.

Here’s some of what’s new and cool:

• Lots more apps: We’re testing a growing library of apps that let you get more done without leaving the page. Some of these apps include eBay and MySpace, and content sites like USA Today and NPR. We also have newly developed apps for popular Yahoo! services like Messenger, Movies and Flickr.
• Social pulse: A new Yahoo! Updates app lets you keep up with your friends’ online activities directly on the homepage – such as a recently Buzzed article or a video uploaded to YouTube.
• Easier email: We’ve separated your individual email accounts as distinct apps, rather than a combined inbox, so that it’s faster and easier to get to the exact mail you want. This was a request we heard repeatedly during testing.

What about local personalization?
As a global company, it’s critical that we create localized homepages, and we’re testing them now in France, India and the UK. While we’ll provide a consistent experience across all our global homepages in terms of design, they will be customized with information and apps that are locally relevant. For example, the new homepage in India will include a Cricket app and a whole host of others that are India-centric, while the UK site will include apps such as underground alerts, news from the BBC, and more.

This screenshot shows London Underground alerts from Transport for London:

We’re excited about the new direction of our homepages, especially because you’ve helped us build them. The designs being tested are changing frequently based on your input. Stay tuned for updates in the months ahead as we roll them out more broadly.

Tapan Bhat
SVP, Integrated Consumer Experiences, Yahoo!

As many of you know, we started testing new concepts for the Yahoo! homepage last fall, with the goal of helping to simplify the Web for the more than 300 million people around the world who visit the site each month.

We are wrapping up the first phase of our “bucket testing” and have gleaned some great insights from people in the US, UK, France and India who have tried out the new page. We’ve done a number of things to collect input –- from reading your comments here on Yodel to reviewing online feedback forms and customer care inquires to meeting with many of you in person and online. Bottom line is we’re getting closer to the final design, but we’re not quite there yet.

Before I share details around what we’ve learned, I wanted to give a quick recap of some of the functionality we’ve added over the past few months since just a fraction of you have experienced it firsthand.

Back in September, we introduced a new section called “My Apps.” The great part about having apps on your homepage is that you can easily check in and get more done –- from reading and responding to multiple email accounts to browsing local movie listings –- all without leaving the page.

Today, we’ve enhanced that experience and we’re testing more than 25 apps that will keep you updated with whatever you want to know. New additions include apps from eBay, Forbes.com, Wired.com and more top brands. We’ve also beefed up the Sports and Finance apps, for example, providing schedules, team standings, blogs links and more, plus one-click access to your stock portfolios and stock quotes. The best part is that the “My Apps” section is now customizable so you can add and remove apps (check out this screenshot) so your homepage reflects what matters most to you.

Here’s what we’ve heard from our testers:

Positive Feedback

• People are happy with the streamlined look and feel
• There’s lots of love for the applications
• Most testers said they prefer the new homepage over the current homepage

One comment that sums it up nicely:

“Well — I was surprised at first at how little change was introduced, and liked that. Now I’m surprised by how much change actually is packed in, but is more interaction based… Basically it’s deceptively different — looks and feels the same, but much more functionality built in at a new layer.” – Thomas

What We’re Working On
Now that we’ve got a critical mass of input, we’re translating it into updated versions of the page for ongoing testing. Here are some highlights.

• The #1 thing we’re hearing you want is more apps and we’ll be adding many apps in the coming weeks
• Most didn’t like the dark color that we tested initially — see the screenshot below of the new visual treatments we’re testing
• Easier ways to access and preview email and instant messaging accounts are in the works
• It should be easier to get to other Yahoo! services that you’ve come to rely upon

We don’t take changes to your homepage lightly and your input is critical. To help our designers and engineers, tell us what else you think we should consider. Is there a killer app that you’d love to see?

Know that we’re working hard to create a new homepage that you’ll love and we’ll keep you posted as we get closer to launching. Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Tapan Bhat
Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Front Doors, Communities and Network Services

One hundred million people. It’s the population of America’s 60 largest cities combined (from NYC to Toledo). It’s about three million more than the size of this year’s record-breaking Super Bowl audience. And it’s the number of people who visit the Yahoo! Homepage every month.

I’ve always wondered what it’s like to program news content for that kind of a massive audience. (Let’s just say Yodel Anecdotal’s readership has a ways to go.) After all, you’re basically responsible for informing roughly one in every two American Internet users about what’s happening in our world…and influencing what they talk about over cube walls. What does that responsibility feel like? How do they stay on top of the fire hose of news and then decide what gets one of those precious links? Who is “they” and what prepares them for this big job? How do they know what will click? What was it like to cover this year’s Election?

I took a camera backstage to answer these questions and more. Enjoy this up-close-and-personal look inside the Yahoo! Homepage newsroom.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Filmed and edited by Bart Bishoff, Yahoo! Broadcast Bureau

As many of you know, we’ve been testing a new Yahoo.com homepage since September. We chose a random fraction from our millions of users in four countries to play around with the new homepage and give us feedback on the new features.

As expected, we’ve gotten a wide range of reactions from our testers -– the good, the bad, and the ugly. We’ve heard every word and have made some changes accordingly. For example, in the latest version, we’ve added a Mail link to the “Yahoo! Services” area so that people can get to their email faster. We’ll keep making changes and updates like this throughout the testing phase, with the goal of making this new homepage the ideal starting point for everything people want to do on the Internet, whether it’s on or off Yahoo!.

On that note, I want to highlight a great new application that we’ve just added to the homepage test. Demonstrating how we’re opening our homepage to third-parties to make your life simpler, we’re adding a new eBay application to the “My Applications” dashboard area. It will provide an “eBay Anywhere” experience, letting people quickly monitor their eBay buying and selling activities, including checking recent bids or getting reminders about auctions that are about to close. They can also as search for and find new eBay items right from within Yahoo.com. You can read more about it on Ebay’s blog here.

We’ve pulled together this screencast to introduce you to the new eBay app, and take you on a tour of the newest version of the Yahoo! homepage test. It might also satisfy the curiosity of those of you who haven’t yet had a chance to play around with the new site.

If you’re in one of our test groups, we really rely on your feedback and hope you know how important you are in helping us build the best possible site. We’ll keep testing until we think we’ve got it right. So keep the feedback coming!

Tapan Bhat
Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Front Doors, Communities and Network Services