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!

Today, Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! Mobile Blog, which you can find at ymobileblog.com.  The blog will provide you with interesting information on what’s been happening in the industry, and behind the scenes at Yahoo! Mobile — from new products and features, to quick tips and tricks to market trends and predictions.

Below, you will find the first post from Irv Henderson, VP of global mobile products for Yahoo!.  In it, Irv discusses the purpose of the blog, background on Yahoo! Mobile and his views on what’s to come for 2010.

To add the Yahoo! Mobile Blog to your RSS reader, click here to subscribe:

We have good news to share with everyone who uses Yahoo! and Facebook – in the first half of 2010 we will open the door between two of the Internet’s largest online communities. You will be able to see your Facebook friends’ activities on Yahoo! and share Yahoo! content – ratings, photos, article comments, and more – directly on your Facebook stream.  We’re doing this by deeply integrating a service called Facebook Connect across Yahoo!  properties worldwide, which we announced today.

As the place where over 500 million people visit every month, Yahoo!’s goal is to bring together social experiences from across the web, and provide one place for people to access information and stay in touch with the people they care about most.

Yahoo!’s integration of Facebook Connect will provide you with richer experiences across the Yahoo! products you use every day, such as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Sports.  In the future, you’ll be able to choose where you want to update your status message – from destinations across Yahoo! – or directly on Facebook.

We are doing this as part of our commitment to deliver more personally relevant Internet experiences, so watch for more details in the New Year!

Jim Stoneham, VP of Communities for Yahoo!

Today, of course, is the eighth anniversary of the September 11th attacks in NYC, the Pentagon, and rural Pennsylvania. To ensure we never forget, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum just put out a call for people from around the globe to “Make History” with their images, videos, and stories as a permanent digital archive. Here’s how we made history this week:

• F-F-Fantastic phone apps: For the millions of you with touch-screen phones, you can now download some of Yahoo!’s most popular services. Call them the Three F’s: Finance, Flickr and Fantasy Football (or is that four Fs?). With interactivity reminiscent of their Web-based counterparts, these apps let you access our services on the go from an iPhone, iPod touch or select Blackberry models (including Bold, Tour and 8900 series). For now, Finance and Fantasy Football users can download them in the U.S. and Canada, while the Flickr app is also available in the UK, France, Hong Kong, and Singapore. For a deeper dive, check out our post earlier this week.
• Inviting apps & jumbo files: The new and improved Yahoo! Mail just debuted three new apps that turn your inbox into even more of a productivity hub. Head over to that handy Applications box and you’ll notice new apps from Evite and pingg — two options for sending and managing invitations. They sensibly integrate with tools like Yahoo! Calendar, Yahoo! Address Book and Yahoo! Maps to take the stress out of party-planning (and -going). And the new Attach Large Files app, courtesy of the folks at drop.io, lets you upload and share files up to 100MB. You can also collaborate by commenting on files, leaving a voicemail for more context or dialing in to a conference call for a real-time powwow. Read more here.
• Neighbors helping neighbors: Let’s say that waffle iron you plugged in blew your kitchen fuse and it’s been a blue moon since you last called an electrician. Where do you turn? The best tips are often from the people you bump into every day in your neighborhood. And we’ve just made it easier to get their word-of-mouth recommendations. Yahoo! Neighbors, a new feature on Yahoo! Local, lets you get answers to everyday problems. Use it to find local services or post questions and tips for the community. For a taste, check out this thread from some users in Dallas in search of a driving school.
• New souped-up Messenger for Mac: For all you Mac users, there’s a new beta version of Messenger available for download. Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 comes with a bunch of new bug fixes to help it run more smoothly. You’ll also get the Messenger Insider window that’s available on Windows versions, giving you a daily snapshot of what’s happening on Yahoo! and around the world. Want to take it for a test drive? Download it here and read more here.

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

We’re sprucing up the joint today with major enhancements to three of our most popular products as part of our quest to make Yahoo! the center of your online world. We’ve rolled out improvements to Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Search to make them more personally relevant, help you get more done in less time, and keep you better connected with the people and things that matter to you most.

Let’s start with Yahoo! Mail.
After much testing, today we’ve reached a significant Yahoo! Mail milestone by bringing the best of the web – including photosharing, third-party apps and social features – to people’s inboxes… all 300 million inboxes around the world.

For photo hounds, we’ve introduced new multi-select and drag-and-drop functionality that makes it easier to attach photos, view thumbnail previews, and rotate images before you send them. And we’ve upped the photo and filesize limits from 10MB to 25MB.

We’ve also streamlined the inbox experience to further expand the social and open capabilities. A new Application Box brings third-party open apps like PayPal, Picnik, Xoopit, and ZumoDrive together with Flickr, Calendar and Notepad to make managing your email folders easier. Plus, we’re excited to add a new app to the gallery in a few weeks from Evite. With the Evite app you’ll be able to create invitations, check on events, and add items to your Calendar all from one place. And we are only scratching the surface on the apps available. Stay tuned as we roll out additional apps worldwide and specific apps for regional markets over the coming year.

Your inbox will soon be a bit more social, filtering out the noise by surfacing the most recent emails from your contacts and giving you birthday reminders. In addition, we’ve improved Yahoo! Contacts so you can automatically get updates when a contact changes their name, e-mail address or phone number.

We’ve also redesigned Yahoo! Mail for the mobile web (http://m.yahoo.com), giving you one-click access to check, compose and search email; allowing attachment downloads like Microsoft Office, PDFs and photos; and letting you access personal folders on the go. It’s available today on the iPhone and will be released on 400 other devices with HTML browsers on September 1st.

Here’s a video tour of some of the new features in Yahoo! Mail:

Introducing Yahoo! Messenger 10
With this new release of Yahoo! Messenger, the biggest news is the debut of truly high quality video calling. Using your Web cam, you can now have full-screen, face-to-face video conversations with crystal clear audio for free from right within your Yahoo! Messenger window. Messenger is also more getting social as we roll out new features to help you stay in closer contact with friends and family. A new “Updates” tab gives you a quick glimpse of what your contacts are up to – including status updates, Flickr uploads, Yahoo! Buzz stories, Tweets and more. Since our popularity only grows around the globe, we’re also letting you customize your client with one of 16 languages without having to download a different version. And finally, an improved iPhone Messenger app ensures the same great experience with your contacts’ messages even when you’re on the go.

Download the Messenger 10 Beta here: http://messenger.yahoo.com/winbeta. And be sure to check out a demo of what’s new in Yahoo! Messenger 10:

Testing the new Yahoo! Search.
To prove just how committed we are to continued innovation in your search experience, we’re testing a new search results page that ups the ante on personal relevance. We’re providing new tools for refining results that let you explore related concepts, display only results from popular Yahoo! and third-party sites, and narrow results by types of content like people, videos, and discussion forums.

We’re also using advanced science to detect what you’re searching for based on your search history. For example, if you search for “cat” and then later for “jaguar” we can figure out that you’re looking for content about the animal and not the car.

We’re running random bucket tests (no opt-in at this time) of this new version of search with a small subset of our users. In case you’re not one of the lucky millions, here’s a sneak preview of what we’re testing:

Finally, following the lead of the new Yahoo! Homepage, which now proudly wears our corporate color, we are introducing a new “universal header” across every Yahoo! product and service in the U.S. It not only sports a purple logo, it also features a Yahoo! Search box that integrates Search Assist on every page. We never want you to have to go far to find what you’re looking for.

Check out screenshots of our various enhancements as well as more details of today’s news at our Press Room and over at the Yahoo! Messenger Blog and the Yahoo! Mail Blog.

Bryan Lamkin
SVP Yahoo! Applications

If your email inbox is anything like mine, it’s turned into a “digital shoebox” over the years. It’s full of hundreds or maybe thousands of special photos that have been shared by close friends and family members, but they’re not organized in any particular way. I open them, occasionally print or forward them, and then move on to my mail, letting precious pictures become buried in the unlimited storage of my inbox.

Enter Xoopit, which Yahoo! signed an agreement to acquire today. Their name may sound familiar – they won our Open Hack Day last fall and we teamed with them in December to launch the “My Photos” app in Yahoo! Mail, which many of you are already using today. In fact, it’s the most popular third party app in Yahoo! Mail.

With the integration of Xoopit’s platform technology and capabilities, the task of sending photos via email will be as easy as it should be and sharing photo albums with friends and family members will also be a cinch. You’ll be able to share your pictures among a group of friends or family like never before – combining pictures from numerous sources into a single album for a private group to view. And soon your inbox will become an organized photo index as well. Just imagine having a tool that collects all the photos you’ve sent and received over the years into that scrapbook you’ve never had time to assemble.

In short, Xoopit will bring phenomenal photo organization, improved photo sharing, and the serendipity of discovering forgotten photos to Yahoo! Mail.

Why is this such a big deal? Yahoo! Mail is actually home to one of the largest online photo repositories in the world. And every day, millions of you use Yahoo! Mail as your primary way to share the photos of important moments in your lives. While social networks and community sites are great for sharing photos with everyone you know, we realize it’s not for everyone or every occasion. For many, email is still best for sharing photos among a more select group of friends or family. And now we’re making it all that much easier for you.

For a flavor of what’s to come, take a look at this quick demo of how Xoopit currently works in Yahoo! Mail’s “My Photos” app.

BTW: I know what you’re thinking. In comes the guy who oversaw Photoshop for 13 years and all he can think about is photos? Well, rest assured a smart team was thinking about solving this problem well before I showed up on Yahoo!’s doorstep. And it’s just one of the many things on our plate to ensure we’re improving our products!

Please join me in welcoming the talented Xoopit team to the Yahoo! family. We can’t wait to help you tap your inbox for all those great photos waiting to be rediscovered.

Bryan Lamkin
SVP Yahoo! Applications

PS: For you Gmail+Xoopit users out there who’ve been waiting for an excuse to switch to Yahoo!, here’s your chance. But, in the meantime, we will still be providing support for your Xoopit Firefox Add-on.

Whether you spell it doughnut or donut, today’s the official day of honor for these deep-fried morsels. Back in 1938, the Salvation Army declared National Doughnut Day to celebrate the women who went to the front lines during WWI to feed the troops, often cooking doughnuts right inside their helmets. Now you know why soldiers were commonly called doughboys. (Note: This should not be confused with Flickr’s hallowed Day of the Donut). Here’s what we fried up this week:

• Surf less, do more: In the spirit of helping you take productivity to the Nth degree, we’re sprinkling great new third-party apps and widgets across our site. Now you can interact with content and tools from providers like Youtube, Mint.com, eBay, WordPress, Showtime, Picnik, and ZumoDrive in places like Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Connected TV and Zimbra email. We call it the gift of time. More here.
• Winning the email battle: If your email inbox has become your evil overlord, we’re empowering you with a great new weapon — new filters for Yahoo! Mail. Now you can basically snap your fingers and filter your inbox for the mail you actually want to read. Just click on “Contacts” above your inbox and presto, you’ll only see mail from people who are in your address book. The team is rolling this out to Classic and new Yahoo! Mail users in the U.S. and Australia over the next few weeks, with more countries to follow. More here.
• Sticky wickets: The ICC World Twenty20, the world championship of cricket, kicked off today in England and fans the world over won’t miss a single bowl-out, thanks to Yahoo! Cricket. Our T20 coverage includes exclusive cricket content, player chats, videos and images from the tournament. From history of the game to up-to-date statistics on cricketers, cricket.yahoo.com offers elaborate coverage — series stats and records, data on women’s cricket teams, coach interviews, fantasy game, and more. That outta get the Snick-o-Meter going.

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Did you know people in the U.S. visit an average of 85 sites per month? That just sounds exhausting. So we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can ease the pain of site-hopping to help you do more things at once.

This week, you’ll find a number of new third-party “apps” and “widgets” on Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Connected TV and Zimbra email to give you quicker access to the things you do online every day – whether planning your dinner menu, sharing photos with friends, or looking for YouTube videos. Below are screenshots and more info on some that we think are especially handy.

Make the Most of Your Inbox
Back in December, we started testing Yahoo! Mail apps that let you do all kinds of new things from your inbox. Today we’re introducing more great options, including:

• PayPal: request or send money securely
• Picnik: edit photos and share photo collages
• Zumo Drive: email files as large as 100MB for free

These apps are only available to a limited number of people during our beta period. Read more about the new Yahoo! Mail apps introduced today, and if you’d like to try it out, click here and enter your Yahoo! ID.

Personalized Productivity on My Yahoo!
We opened up My Yahoo! in December to tap into innovation from third party developers across the Web and give you even more choice for your personalized start page. Some of the new My Yahoo! apps available today include:

• Mint.com: manage your finances, set budgets and get money-saving tips
• Food & Wine Pairing: find recipes, menus, wine reviews and recommended pairings
• Green Lifestyle: grow your green knowledge and help benefit the environment
• WordPress: post to your blog and moderate your recent comments

To add these and other apps to your page, click on any of the links above or go to “Add Content” and look for the “Open Apps” category in the My Yahoo! gallery. These apps are built on the Yahoo! Application Platform, and you can read more about them and many others on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.

Do More on Your TV
Back in March, we helped raise your TV’s IQ with widgets that can deliver the best of the Internet to your living room. In addition to your favorite Web sites like Flickr, Twitter, USA Today Sports, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Weather, Internet-enabled TVs from Samsung and LG Electronics (coming soon from Sony and VIZIO) now feature more best-of-the-web Yahoo! TV widgets, including:

• YouTube: search and view YouTube’s massive library of video content on your TV screen
• Showtime: find information, schedules, interviews and short clips from popular Showtime offerings
• eBay (coming soon): get real-time updates, place bids, and monitor your favorite items on eBay

Zimlets Anyone?
Even Yahoo!’s Zimbra (our advanced open-source email & collaboration software) is getting into the mix, introducing a handful of new Zimlets (which integrate new features in email, similar to the Yahoo! Mail applications). Automatically save emails as documents, drop sticky notes on messages, and handle expense reports with one click. More information can be found on the Zimbra blog.

By making Yahoo! more open, we’re able to bring all that is good and useful on the Web even closer to your fingertips. We’re constantly adding new apps, so stay tuned for more.

Tapan Bhat
SVP, Integrated Consumer Experiences, Yahoo!

It’s National Frozen Foods Day! A time to honor the cryogenic wizardry that prolongs the life and freshness of pizzas, peas, breakfast sausage, Hungry Man dinners, ice cream, and, of course, snowballs. Honorable mention goes to the microwave today. Here’s what we nuked up this week:

• Video free for all: Flickr made several video headlines on Monday. First, they granted free video uploads to all users (hooray!). Then they introduced HD video uploads for Pro users (yahooo!), bringing the magical and glorious world of crisp, aperture-rich high-definition video to the viewing masses on Flickr. And, finally, they introduced Flickr Clock, a unique new toy that lets you explore videos taken across the Flickrverse by time of day. Oh! And unrelated to video, free Flickr users are no longer relegated to organizing photos into just three sets — let’s hear it for unlimited sets for your 200 most recent photos.
• In the loop on Mail: If you noticed something different when you logged into Yahoo! Mail, that’s because the team has been sprucing up the page with more new social features. As we said in December, we’re working on bringing you a “smarter inbox.” Initially, you could see your friends’ Yahoo!-related updates (i.e., stories they’ve buzzed on Yahoo! Buzz, hotels rated on Yahoo! Travel, etc.). But now you can see their updates from across the web — sites like YouTube, Blogger, Yelp, Picasa, and more. And there are many more Yahoo! sites now live, including Yahoo! Sports and Flickr. More here.
• Inquisitive iPhone: If you own an iPhone in the U.S., I suggest you run — don’t walk — to the App Store and download yourself a copy of the new Inquisitor app. This new mobile version of Inquisitor makes searching on your iPhone a breeze by autocompleting keywords and making search suggestions, so you can spend less time typing and more time finding. Here’s the buzz on Twitter. Obama’s not your president? Sit tight — it’s coming to your world soon.
• That’s my Mac calling: If you’re a Mac head and like calling your friends via Yahoo! Messenger, listen up. One of our engineers has written a plugin that lets you automatically dial a friend from within your Mac Address Book. Just install the script, open a friend’s contact card, right-click on the phone number, select “Call with Yahoo! Messenger,” and start gabbing away. Make sure you have Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 Beta 4. More here.

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

I’m not making this up — according to a variety of calendar-conscious websites, today is Yodel for Your Neighbors Day. So get out your lederhosen, head to the McMillan’s front porch, and let out your best yodelayeehoo. Unfortunately, there’s no guidance on what happens next, though I’d imagine it involves sprinting. Here’s what we belted out this week:

• Classic Mail gets chatty: If you’re a Yahoo! Mail Classic diehard but long for some of the less retro features of the new Yahoo! Mail, the product team has your compromise. They’ve just unveiled two chatty features that will be rolled out to mailboxes over the next few months. You’ll be able to send instant messages and SMS messages to your Yahoo! contacts right from the mail interface. Your contact list will highlight who’s online and who’s mobile so you can get to them faster than email (remember when we thought faxes were fast?). Read more on the Mail and Messenger blogs.
• Bye-bye Briefcase: We’ve decided to discontinue Yahoo! Briefcase, effective March 30th. When it was born nearly ten years ago, it saw great usage, but that’s been declining over the years as people turned to places like Yahoo! Mail (unlimited storage, yeah!) and Flickr, both of which make it easier to share things. We know that’s disappointing to those of you who still rely on it, but discontinuing Yahoo! Briefcase lets us focus on the products that are more broadly used. Please, please remove your files before March 30th as you won’t be able to access them thereafter — we wouldn’t want you to lose anything.
• Year of the ox: There’s nothing quite like the guilty pleasure of checking a horoscope. And this week, you need to make that a Chinese horoscope. In honor of the Lunar New Year, the team at Yahoo! Shine has pulled together this overview of what the year of the ox will bring to oxen (as well as goats, pigs, rats, monkeys, etc.). Gong hei fat choi!

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