Here are a few of our favorites:

• Personalize your in-box: Yahoo! Mail has many colorful themes to choose from and two of them are even animated! People with newer Macbooks who use the Google Chrome browser can have an alien zipping around their screen. To check it out go to Yahoo! Mail, “Options”, “Themes” and select the thumbnail with the alien in the UFO. Move your laptop around to see the alien fly faster. There’s another theme that moves too. We’ll give you a hint – it’s blue. Hey, we don’t want to give everything away so easy!

• Keep your in-box tidy: Automatic Organizer sorts your emails according to pre-set preferences so your inbox doesn’t spiral out of control. Regret signing up for some of those newsletters? Use the Unsubscribe feature to safely get off mailing lists. And to manage your emails, set up folders so it’s easy to find the important ones. If you right click on an email and select “filter emails like this”, you can set up an automatic filter to make email filing a snap.

• Photo Slide Shows: Yahoo! Mail detects photos in your incoming emails, so you can view slideshows right from your Inbox. An incoming email that contains photos, or a link to a photo service like Flickr, displays thumbnail images at the bottom of the message.

• Take it with you: Yahoo! Mail is mobile. Apple iOS5 users can easily add their Yahoo! Mail account to their iPhones & iPads. Android users can download our popular Yahoo! Mail Android app from Google Play.

• Organize your purchases: Drowning in email receipts? Online shoppers, rejoice – we’ve got you covered. Sign up for the All My Purchases app within Yahoo! Mail to get all of your receipts and purchase information centralized in one spot.

• Hidden Cat: For all cat-lovers out there, be sure to Alt-Click on the Yahoo! Mail logo within Mail to meet our resident team mascot. “Fluffy” can only be seen for people using Firefox or Internet Explorer.
• Become a productivity master: Shift + ? pulls up all of the keyboard shortcuts within Yahoo! Mail. Learn new shortcuts like N = new message, T = start a new text and P = print message.

And to those of you without a Yahoo! Mail account, open a new account to see what you’ve been missing!

Thankfully, many of us who work at Yahoo! believe that we have the best job in the company. If I based my hubris on other people who tell me I have the best job at Yahoo!, I see experiential marketing rise above all others to the top of the heap.

I lead a small team that is responsible for complementing and amplifying marketing projects — for consumers and B2B audiences — by creating rich 1:1 experiences that provide a moment of pause, reflection, and engagement with our brand in ways that support our digital marketing efforts, but provide a differentiated offline approach. These experiences establish emotional bonds between our audience and Yahoo!’s products and services, and put a human “face” to our brand in a way that online marketing may not.

Some of the recent projects we have supported include 2010’s Ask America program and 2011’s launch of the latest Yahoo! Mail. We also get to think hard about brand marketing challenges like how to keep Yahoo!’s trademark “yodel” in the hearts and minds of consumers. On our plate for the coming year are efforts to engage voters across the country with Yahoo! News in the countdown to the presidential election, launching Tom Hanks’ “Electric City,” and global marketing support for the 2012 Olympics.

We hold our programs to an important set of guiding principles:

1. Assure that every experience is built to drive traffic back to Yahoo! or change the perception of our brand
2. Create sharable experiences and provide the tools for users to share
3. Provide “hands-on” experiences
4. Engage our audiences with surprising, relevant, smile-inducing experiences

No surprise that the word experience appears in every principle, right? Not every program at Yahoo! is right for experiential efforts: we are not a scalable acquisition channel, and, in fact, creating offline manifestations of our online product experiences are not always effective in public settings. Instead, we look for opportunities to draw related connections between an offline experience and our online products and services.

Perfect case in point: the 2011 launch of the latest version of Yahoo! Mail. We were a small part of the overall launch marketing plan for the product, but we were an extremely visible component. Our objective was specifically not to provide users with a chance to try the new Mail. Instead, our role was to alleviate potential apprehension about the planned migration from older versions of Mail to the new version—and we wanted to drive positive buzz and word of mouth by creating a fun experience that would enhance consumers’ personal connection to the product and leave them with the feeling that “Yahoo! is the best thing that happened to me today.” In other words: kindness always wins, while talking about our spam protection on a street corner may not.

Our solution was two-pronged.  First, we dispatched 20 Yahoo! Mail Carriers (kitted out bike messengers) in Chicago and New York who were tasked with creating that random act of kindness. They handed unsuspecting users a large Yahoo! Mail “super envelope” that contained something for them — a Starbucks gift card, or a packet of wildflower seeds — and an additional duplicate gift for them to share with a friend. This interaction brought to life the Yahoo! Mail promise that the product facilitated connections with those people who matter most to you. Consumers loved the surprising gift from Yahoo! Mail, and they shared the gifts and their positive experience with their friends and family.

The second prong of our approach became a viral sensation — internally amongst fellow Yahoos who were busting a nut to launch the new Mail; and externally with consumers who got to interact with a 6-foot-tall talking purple mailbox.

Yes, you heard me. A talking mailbox, affectionately dubbed The Yahoo! Purple People Greeter, who stood on street corners in Brooklyn and Manhattan doling out bon mots, along with personally relevant gifts in a Yahoo! Mail super envelope: a pair of flip flops for someone on their way to buy shoes, a harmonica for a musician, a dog bone for a pet owner, and an iPad for a grad student. How did an inanimate purple box know enough to have such relevant gifts on hand, who to distribute them to, or just what to say to make people laugh, jump and even cry with joy? That’s a secret the experiential team will take to our grave. Or, you could just take us to lunch and we’ll probably give up the goods.

But most importantly, the experience worked. We made people’s days. We heard, and kept, some deep dark secrets. But most importantly, we turned our interactions with a relatively small number of individuals into compelling, hilarious, highly entertaining video content, which we then distributed on Yahoo! and via social channels.

After our rewarding experience in New York, we hit the road with our large purple friend. To Chicago where the mailbox sweltered and relied on the cold water of strangers, to Austin where he rocked out at Emo’s and tried (unsuccessfully) to crowd surf during a performance by Futurebirds, and ultimately to San Francisco where we arrived just in time to fuel Giants playoff fever with many sets of tickets to the World Series champs’ final games of the season.

Our social media channels loved the Purple Mailbox and we generated significant positive sentiment for Yahoo! Mail and our brand as a whole. We turned these impromptu consumer experiences into high-quality digital content that drove engagement with our brand both on- and off-network. And we gave employees an opportunity to laugh, cheer and smile during a transitional time for our company.

Our competitors don’t have a purple talking mailbox who makes people laugh. Nor do they regularly engage consumers in surprising, yet relevant offline locales. Yahoo! understands that marketing takes on many forms, and they all work together to drive success for our company and engagement with our users. Especially those that are six-feet-tall and purple. I love my job.

Andrew Strickman,
Sr. Director, Experiential 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.

Today Yahoo! announced a big milestone in the fight against spam – we were awarded a $610 million judgment against spammers responsible for creating a fake Yahoo! lottery email scheme. This scheme was perpetrated against email users and led them to believe that they were being offered a lottery prize from Yahoo!. You can read about the actual case and the judgment issued by a New York judge here.

As a leader in anti-spam protection, we are constantly looking at how we can win the war on spam, and take several different approaches to help keep our 300-million Yahoo! Mail users as safe as possible. On the technology front, we are continually updating our technology engine to stay one step ahead of spammers. In fact, Yahoo! Mail blocks more than 600 billion spam messages each and every month (that’s over 7.2 TRILLION spam messages we block each year.) And, since introducing an updated version of Yahoo! Mail in May this year, we’ve reduced the amount of spam reported by our Mail users by an additional 60%.

More importantly, today’s ruling shows that Yahoo! goes after spammers. In a big way. We initially started building this specific case back in 2008 and have diligently been pursuing it since then. Why? Because we are vigilant about protecting you, every other Yahoo! User and the online industry in general. We do not, nor will we in the future, hesitate to bring legal action against wrong doers who are engaging in fraudulent activities across our platforms.

Is the fight against spam over? Not by a long shot. Every day the spammers try to figure out how to stay one-step ahead of the good guys, and every day Yahoo! employs the latest technology we can to stop them.

But what we can say is that today Yahoo! won a major round against spammers.

Hello, world! We’d like to give a big welcome to our new Yahoo! Mail markets and languages around the world.

Yes, that’s right – today we’re announcing the international expansion of Yahoo! Mail to 27 new markets and 22 new languages. 700 million of you have already come to know and love Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail and all of the different experiences we have to offer, but we have been focused on extending Yahoo! to even more of you worldwide.

With today’s news, Yahoo! Mail is now in more than 70 markets and 46 languages worldwide. Moreover, by adding these languages and markets today, we’re now able to reach a potential 226 million new people across every single continent.  Or to put it another way, with a push of a button (or two) approximately 90% of the world’s Internet population can now use Yahoo! Mail in their native language.

Some of the new languages and markets coming on board:

• Ten new languages in Asia, including eight new languages in India alone.
• Twelve new languages in Europe, including Serbian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Croatian.
• Several new markets around the globe, including South Africa, Belgium, Austria and Portugal.

Since launching Yahoo! Mail earlier this year in May, we’ve been continuously focused on delivering a faster, safer and easier online communications experience, expanding into markets like Arabic with our Maktoob launch, and now we’re delighted to offer it to all these new countries. Check it out, have fun, and let us know what you think!

James Carroll, SVP Global Products Development

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

A personalized living magazine just for you — Livestand for iPad is here: Livestand weaves together content from leading third-party publishers and Yahoo!’s global media network to create a visually stunning and deeply personalized digital experience tailored for you and your interests and passions. Whether it’s presenting the latest recipes, timely tweets, breaking news, or blog posts, Livestand brings you the content you care about like you’ve never seen before. Check out the video below, read more here, or better yet, visit the App Store and download Livestand for free today.

The perfect companion for your TV – IntoNow for iPad: IntoNow makes TV-watching more engaging, social, and fun with one touch of a button. Like magic, IntoNow automatically identifies what you’re watching – whether live or recorded – and displays related content and personalized recommendations on what to watch. It also lets you have conversations with friends who are watching the same shows, and follow Twitter feeds of actors and athletes on TV. It’s available today for free download in the App Store.

Today’s forecast is sunny with a touch of Flickr – Yahoo! Weather for Android: The new Yahoo! Weather app brings weather to life with beautiful photos that correspond with where you are, what the weather’s like, and what time of day it is. All the photos are from the Flickr community, with a crowdsourcing effort launching at http://flickr.com/projectweather to create a global-weather image library. The app is available as a free download in the Android Market in 35 languages and 63 countries.

A fresh way to look at email – Yahoo! Mail for iPad browser – Yahoo! Mail gives you a rich, vivid entry point on your iPad Web browser for viewing unread emails from your contacts, as well as customized local weather, trending video content, and personalized news. Read more here or head to mail.yahoo.com from any iPad to try it out.

Get your social on while reading the news – Conversations and Notifications on Yahoo!: A couple of new social features expand upon the Yahoo! News activity we launched last month to give you more ways to connect, communicate, and get updates from your friends. Want to chat about a story you’re reading? The Conversations feature lets you have small group conversations within Yahoo! News. The new Notifications feature will inform you of new social activity of interest across Yahoo! – such as feedback on reviews, responses to comments, or new conversations with friends. Both Conversations and Notifications will be available in the coming weeks.

Cutting-edge platform with a splash of lime – Cocktails: Livestand is built upon Cocktails, a powerful open platform for developers and publishers that uses many of Yahoo!’s popular developer tools such as YUI and YQL. Read more about this new platform offering here.

Unmatched creative canvas for advertising: Yahoo! continues to evolve its advertising experiences to creatively engage with audiences and tell their stories. Read more about Yahoo!’s new tablet and social advertising offerings here.

In light of this, with the roll out of the new Yahoo! Mail last May, we recently launched more advanced anti-phishing defenses and enhanced spam protection to help protect your inbox.  And we’re happy to report its success.  The Yahoo! team put together new technology that’s now blocking nearly 550 billion spam messages from hitting your inboxes each month – that’s approximately 1,800 emails for every Yahoo! Mail user.

We think the technology we’re using to keep your mailboxes safe is quite awesome and we wanted to show you how we do it, so today we’re going live with the Yahoo! Mail Visualization Project – a view of what no one has seen before using live data…how we use cloud computing and Apache Hadoop technology to filter spam and re-route email for the 300 million mail users we have across the globe.

We won’t bore you with the techy details in writing because it’s much more compelling to see…

So why is it important for us to reveal how Yahoo! Mail works? Because we’re proud to show the science and technology powering the products you use every day.  Through the visualization project, we can demonstrate the technology behind the Yahoo! Network and show the impact that the tech has on you, the consumers of Yahoo!’s great technology.  As a quick example, the anti-spam protection we mentioned earlier uses Hadoop to aggregate anonymous data from the billions of emails sent and received each day and as a result has helped us reduce spam reports by 65%.  Our technology analyzes all this anonymous data (with the help of Hadoop) and identifies spam patterns so we can then use really intelligent algorithms to predict future email patterns that will differentiate “good” and “bad” senders.

To give some perspective on how powerful our computing technology is, think about these fun facts:

• For every loving message from mom, Yahoo! Mail blocks 4 spam messages from the people she warned you about.
• In the time it takes you to read this, our Hadoop software (the brain behind Yahoo! Mail) has learned from more than 4 million user actions.
• In the time it takes sunlight to reach earth, Hadoop processes 332 million user actions, helping reduce spam in Yahoo! Mail.
• Hadoop processes 1 terabyte of data (equivalent to 4,000 years of continuous typing) in the time it takes the fastest human to run a mile.
• We add over 70 million Yahoo! Mail accounts per year – that’s the combined population of London, NYC, Paris and Tokyo.

With that we’ll leave you with the link to the Mail Visualization project.  It’s super interactive and ready for you to check it out for yourself: http://visualize.yahoo.com/

-Markus Weimer, Yahoo! Labs
-Andreas Neumann, Grid Architect

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.

Get ready world, the latest version of Yahoo! Mail is moving out of Beta and coming to an inbox near you! This faster, safer, and easier email experience will roll out to you and all of Yahoo! Mail’s 284-million users worldwide, offering fun, engaging and productive features consistent across PC, mobile and tablet devices. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Prioritizes the People and Things that Matter Most: Yahoo! Mail now offers you a more personally relevant experience focused on the people and messages that matter most to you:

• Quickly view and reply to messages, photos and videos: You can instantly respond to messages from Facebook, Yahoo! Groups and webmail providers directly from your inbox with an easy reply bar.
• Conversations that matter: Yahoo! Mail prioritizes messages and contacts that matter most. Now, when you want to compose an IM, SMS or email you will find your most frequent contacts and lists readily available. And, you can store and easily search IM and SMS conversations in addition to emails. Oh and did we mention you can now chat with your Facebook friends right from within Yahoo! Mail?
• Useful applications: You can now track purchases, unsubscribe from unwanted emails or send 100mb (i.e. huge) messages right from your inbox.
• More personalized options: You can choose from many vibrant themes and stationery options to express your personality and customize how you view messages and contacts.

Read more about the new features here.

Designed for Everyone – New Accessibility Features: Yahoo! has made it a priority to make sure the latest version of Yahoo! Mail is even more accessible to people with disabilities. We are proud to say that Yahoo! Mail can be used via a keyboard only or a mouse and leverages context-sensitive instructional text to make it easier for people who use screen readers.  Learn about Yahoo! accessibility initiatives at http://accessibility.yahoo.com

Under the Hood Remodel: This is the largest redesign of Yahoo! Mail in six years, and we rebuilt it with a focus on performance to make it at least 2x faster than previous versions of Yahoo! Mail.  In addition, we upgraded our spam technology to ensure that you aren’t receiving unwanted messages. Did you know that Yahoo! Mail already blocks more than 550 billion spam messages per month? Read more about the improved performance and spam protection here.

Better, Richer, Advertising in Mail: Yahoo! is the market leader in delivering audiences to advertisers, and Yahoo! Mail is no different.  We bring a unique combination of Science, Art and Scale – the Science to understand and target an audience, the Art to engage them within premium content and canvases, and the Scale to reach them in meaningful numbers that drive their business.  Click here to learn more about the advertising features available in Yahoo! Mail.

Nokia Users Get Powered By Yahoo! Mail: All of these great new features and functionality will also be available for Yahoo! Mail’s global partners.  For example, Nokia email and chat services are now “Powered by Yahoo,” offering Nokia users an easier, safer and more social email and chat experience.  Take a look at the Mobile blog to find out more.

The best news:  you don’t have to wait for Yahoo! Mail to come to you. Click here to upgrade and start enjoying, in our humble opinion, the best communications experience on the web (or phone or tablet for that matter)!

Personally yours,

The Yahoo! Mail team

Second Act from Yahoo! News took home the Reality Webby Award in the Online Film & Video category, edging out nominations from reputable sources such as The Washington Post. If you haven’t checked it out already, Second Act is a Yahoo! Originals show that celebrates real people who discover their passions and reinvent themselves to reach for their dreams. Second Act has always aimed high with inspired storytelling, emotional resonance and graceful, artistic execution and has now been recognized as such in the eyes of the creative industry.  We hope you’ve enjoyed the program as much as we’ve enjoyed producing it, check out our season 1 recap below:

Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby – developed with our partners at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners – came away the winner of the Mobile & Experience Marketing award in the Interactive Advertising category, beating out campaigns from recognizable brand such as Unilever. At the end of 2010, Yahoo! ran a highly engaging and interactive local market activation program that showcased Yahoo! Mobile apps. The purpose of this initiative was to encourage people to download and use Yahoo! mobile apps in a meaningful way while showcasing our digital marketing innovation that would generate buzz, water cooler talk, and exhibit thought leadership. The Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby was a two-month citywide gaming challenge held in San Francisco, using first-of-their-kind 72-inch touch screens in transit shelters featuring interactive games tied to four key Yahoo! mobile apps: Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sportacular, Yahoo! Messenger, and Flickr.

In addition to our two wins, our partners at Turner Sports won the People’s Voice award for Best Interactive Use of Video for their Ryder Cup Live Video player powered by Yahoo!. And of course, a big shout out to Yahoo! Finance, which was nominated for the Financial Services award in the Websites category and six Yahoo! properties recognized as honorees (some in more than one category), representing the top 10% of entries in their respective categories.

Congratulations to the Second Act from Yahoo! News and the Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby teams. They will be honored at the 15^th Annual Webby Awards on June 13^th in New York City.

We live in a beautifully content rich world. More than 3.5 million photos get uploaded to Flickr every day. On email we receive nearly 2.5 billion emails each day, and many of us send hundreds of texts and tweets per month. Simply put, life is digital. In order to enjoy and share all this content, people want much more than a PC experience replicated on their tablet or phone—they want something fundamentally new.

As the premier digital media company, we see a clear opportunity to push the boundaries of personalization to deliver intelligent experiences specifically tailored for each individual.  This ultra personalized content experience is our vision for Livestand from Yahoo! – a digital newsstand, delivering a wealth of ever-changing content from multiple publishers, continuously programmed by a person’s interests and contexts.

With Livestand from Yahoo!, what you’re reading will be personalized based on your interests, your location and even the time of day.  Your experiences, which will begin on tablet form factors, will include intuitive touch interactions and an elegant design that focuses foremost on the content.

As the media landscape continues to evolve with mobile and tablet experiences top of mind, publishers and advertisers must expand their content to these platforms to stay in front of consumers.  We see an opportunity to provide publishers and advertisers with a pipeline for fresh and active content and to help them reach and engage their most valuable audiences.

With Livestand, we’re using ad formats that evoke the emotion of TV advertising with a highly-visual magazine-like experience.  And they’re combined with the effectiveness of an Internet ad that’s data-rich, actionable, even location aware.  It’s all personalized and in context – just like our content.

In the first half of 2011, you’ll see Yahoo!’s vast digital content library come to life through Livestand from Yahoo! – from Sports, News, Finance, Flickr, omg!, and the Yahoo! Contributor Network – as iPad and Android tablet applications.

Stay tuned here for more updates over the coming weeks.

Blake Irving, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!
@Blakei

We are thrilled to announce that the neighborhood of North Beach in San Francisco is the winner in the Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby – a two month city-wide challenge that came to an end on January 28th.

Here’s how the competition shaped up:

1. North Beach: 363,650

2. Tenderloin: 329,625

3. Mission: 306,275

The first of its kind, the Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby was a unique experience using 72″ touch LCD screens located in downtown bus shelters. Riders were able to represent their neighborhood by playing interactive games and competing for a community block party with a performance by Grammy winning band, OK Go.

This innovative contest encouraged residents and commuters to engage with games that highlighted Yahoo! Mobile applications. Users were able to compete by choosing a neighborhood from a drop-­down menu on the game screen, then select from four fun and engaging Yahoo! Mobile app-related games themed around Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Sportacular, and Flickr .

On Saturday, February 5th, the North Beach community will celebrate their win and host a block party at The San Francisco Art Institute overlooking iconic San Francisco landmarks such as Coit Tower and Alcatraz. The block party will feature a free performance by Grammy-winning band OK Go, local food vendors and games.

For additional information on Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby & block party, visit: http://www.busstopderby.com/

The campaign will use interactive games to highlight Yahoo!’s mobile app offerings to San Francisco residents and commuters, many of whom spend their down time at transit shelters using smart-phones to get information and stay connected on the go. Users will compete by choosing a neighborhood from a drop-­down menu on the interactive game screen at any transit shelter, then select from 4 fun and engaging Yahoo! Mobile app-related  games themed around Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo!  Messenger, Yahoo! Sportacular, and Flickr.

Participants earn points for  their neighborhoods as they compete against each other in the games, playing in either single-player or competitive mode against other neighborhoods around the city. A wide variety of neighborhoods across San Francisco are represented, including SOMA, North Beach, Mission, Castro, Hayes Valley and many others.

At the end of the campaign, the winning neighborhood will get a free concert from Grammy Award-winning rock band OK Go at a local neighborhood venue.

For complete rules and regulations, as well as a list of the Muni bus stops through out the city that will be included, please visit derby.yahoo.com

Game on, San Francisco riders!

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

Our own luminary, Carol Bartz, will give a keynote speech at the awards ceremony. She will talk about the rise of the insight-driven enterprise; the importance of science, technology, and data to our business; and the power of intense personalization — how we make our products increasingly relevant and improve consumer experiences.

In addition, our top techies will lead discussions about the world’s largest-scale technology challenges, the art of conducting social science research with data from hundreds of millions of people, and the potential for open source technology to change lives, among other topics. Here is a sample of just a few of the talks on the docket at Grace Hopper:

• Elizabeth Churchill, a Yahoo! Labs principal research scientist, will be presenting the results from her recently published paper “Anger Management: Using Sentiment Analysis to Manage Online Communities.”
• Barbara Poblete, also a Yahoo! Labs scientist, will present an introductory workshop on Hadoop, discussing how it can be leveraged for gleaning insights from social data.
• Julia Lee, director of engineering for Yahoo! Mail, will talk about innovating on one of the world’s largest Web mail services, Yahoo! Mail.
• Avni Khatri (front end software engineer) and a team of colleagues will facilitate the open source Codeathon for Humanity event through the Sahana Software Foundation, dedicated to humanitarian projects. During this hands-on event, conference attendees will build software that directly helps those in need.
• Fay Hellal, director of global advertising product marketing invites Kakul Srivastava, vice president of product management for communication products at Yahoo!, on stage for a chat about Women Thriving in Leadership.
• Mani Soni Abrol, an engineer from Yahoo! India, joins colleagues from IBM India and Intel Labs India for a panel on Women in Computing in India: Experiences With Boundaries. They’ll discuss the gender gap and the challenges faced by Indian women in technical industries, including research and academia.

We think technology remains the most rewarding career for women because ultimately it’s about envisioning a better future. This week we celebrate all the women technologists who are making a difference in our world. And to those embarking on their careers in technology: Welcome aboard!

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

If you receive spam email that you think is deceptive, forward it to the Federal Trade Commission at: spam@uce.gov. The FTC uses the spam stored in its database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive email.

For more online safety and privacy tips visit Yahoo!’s Security Center.

Enjoy your online experience and thank you for using Yahoo!.

Warm Regards,

Jeff Russakow
EVP of Customer Advocacy
Yahoo! Inc.

So what does this mean for you? If you are one of the 300 million Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger users worldwide, we’re making it easier to access feature-rich Yahoo! experiences on two of the fastest growing mobile platforms in the market, Android and HTML5-capable browsers.  Get more details on the Yahoo! Messenger app on the Yahoo! Messenger Blog here.

With the new apps for Android, we created fast, easy-to-use and visually stunning experiences for Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, providing rich full-featured experiences right on your Android device, and built from the ground up for the Android platform. We also introduced a Yahoo! Search Widget for Android to provide quick and convenient access to Yahoo! Search, making search easily accessible directly on your home screen. Check out more details on the Yahoo! Search Blog here.

In another exciting new release, we’re leveraging the cutting-edge features of HTML5 and introducing a new Yahoo! Mail web-app, plus a Yahoo! News site, for the iPhone and iPod touch.

The new Yahoo! Mail for mobile web is the most advanced mobile web-app we’ve ever created, making full use of client side databases and advanced caching capabilities, we’re offering faster access, powerful search, and rich content & message previews surfaced directly in the inbox. This amazing new experience is available in 28 languages in more than 200 countries. Read more about the all-new Yahoo! Mail on the Yahoo! Mail Blog here.

Our enhanced Yahoo! News includes a new layout with animated visual effects and navigation that utilizes touch gestures to deliver a compelling news experience.

We’ve been working hard, and listening carefully to our users’ feedback to understand what our consumers want, how a sophisticated mobile experience should behave, and how we could harness the latest cutting-edge technology. The result is a collection of incredible new experiences that represent our continued commitment to provide best-in-class products, while creating a modern and flexible platform for continued innovation and development. We hope you’ll love using these new experiences as much as we’ve loved creating them!

Here is a video with more on Today’s news:

Jason Titus
VP, Yahoo! Mail & Messenger

Irv Henderson
VP, global, mobile products

Starting this week, we will be bringing this vision to life in the Yahoo! products you use every day.  We are starting to integrate Facebook in a big way, a result of the agreement we first signed with Facebook last December. People who use Yahoo! and Facebook can now link their accounts to view and share updates with friends across both networks.  This means you can see your Facebook News Feed from your Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Mail, and other favorite Yahoo! sites and services.  When you create and share content on our properties – including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Answers, and many of our entertainment sites, such as omg!, Yahoo! TV, and Yahoo! Music – you can share that content on Facebook.

Beyond Facebook, your activities on Yahoo! are another important way of bringing social experiences together. Globally, Yahoo! now has more 80 sites producing socially infused content, including three million photos and videos uploaded daily to Flickr, 1.1 million answers provided daily on Yahoo! Answers, and thousands of comments posted daily on articles across Yahoo! sites. These social actions – what we call Yahoo! Updates – can be found in many places across Yahoo!, within products you use and on Yahoo! pages you visit every day.

Our vision is to provide a central hub for people’s online lives, and we understand that requires a Web you can trust.  That’s why this week Yahoo! is making privacy settings even easier to use with a central dashboard.  Rolling out this week as a re-fresh of Yahoo! Profiles, Yahoo! Pulse is a dashboard that makes it simple to set and manage your activities and privacy on Yahoo!.

Expect more to come and until then, share, update your status, and tell us what you think.

Jim Stoneham, Vice President of Communities

Cody Simms, Senior Director, Yahoo! Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN)

Today we are excited to announce a worldwide strategic alliance between Yahoo! and Nokia to extend the reach of our industry leading online services and offer people rich experiences that keep them connected to their world and the world around them.

Building on more than five years of collaboration, Nokia and Yahoo! will leverage each others’ strengths in e-mail, instant messaging and maps and navigation services, to provide consumers with access to world-class experiences on both PC and mobile devices.

As part of the alliance:

• Nokia will be the exclusive, global provider of Yahoo!’s maps and navigation services, integrating Ovi Maps across Yahoo! properties, branded as “powered by Ovi.”
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive, global provider of Nokia’s Ovi Mail and Ovi Chat services branded as “Ovi Mail / Ovi Chat powered by Yahoo!”
• Nokia and Yahoo! plan to work on ID federation between their services, beginning by making it easy for people to use their Ovi user IDs across select Yahoo! properties to easily access  the online content and services they need.

Together, Yahoo! and Nokia will continue to deliver compelling Internet experiences that address the core needs of consumers, developers, operators and advertisers. The companies will utilize their respective global distribution advantages and brand recognition across consumer audiences.

Select, co-branded service offerings are expected to become available from the second half of 2010, with global availability expected in 2011.

Nokia is the world’s largest mobile device manufacturer, with hundreds of millions of devices sold each year and a leader in digital mapping, with continuing investment and innovation focused on developing comprehensive digital mapping and navigation services, now covering 77 countries in 46 languages. With more than 600 million users of Yahoo!-branded sites per month, Yahoo! is a global Internet powerhouse, a one-stop Web destination enabling consumers to enjoy their online life anywhere and everywhere — all customized for their interests. As one of the leading Internet brands, Yahoo! is focused on growing its audience by providing seamless Web experiences across PC and mobile devices.

As the newest Yahoo! employee, at the risk of being highly corny, I’m delighted to yodel my first purple-hued shout-out to the 600 million people and tens of thousands of advertisers and publishers who enjoy Yahoo!’s products every day.

Some of you might ask why anyone would say goodbye to surfing and cycling the Central Coast of California or travelling the globe with their family to take on the job of leading products and technology at Yahoo!  My answer’s pretty easy – meet just some of the brilliant people at Yahoo! that want to change the world, and then scan the amazing list of leading products around the globe these people have delivered at scale.  When I think about what this company has meant to anyone who has used the Internet, worked in the Internet industry, or wanted to reach people across the world, there is simply none better.

From wildly popular services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr and Yahoo!’s mobile sites and apps, to Yahoo!’s best-in-class content properties like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports, to many, many other great products across the world, Yahoo!’s product portfolio continues to be the envy of the industry.  Those incredible services and their respective audiences bring tremendous value for advertisers, which is why Yahoo! serves up 10 billion ads across its network every day and is the #1 publisher of online display advertising. How can anyone not want to be a part of that?

And that’s just what consumers and advertisers see from the outside.  Inside Yahoo!, there’s technological and scientific brilliance everywhere you look.  With 500 patents, one of the world’s largest cloud computing infrastructures, and top scientific talent across computer science, machine learning, economics and social sciences, I’m awed at the caliber of people I’m going to be working with. The intellectual horsepower doesn’t stop there – I’m looking forward to working with some of the smartest and best-in-class talent around the world in marketing, advertising sales, partnerships, programming, service engineering and operations.  The commitment Yahoos have shown over the years to delivering the best experience to both consumers and advertisers is one of the key things that attracted me here.  We’re in the business of delivering bespoke experiences to our consumers, partners and advertisers and I’m looking forward to working with all of you to build on that reality.

This week marks an exciting new journey for me personally, and I’m thrilled to be sharing my experiences and background with the world class people at Yahoo!  We have big opportunities, as well as big challenges ahead of us, and I’m getting ready to dive in and work with this great team to make Yahoo! even more central to daily online life than it has been over the past decade and a half.

My first day in the office will be May 17^th and I can’t wait to get started. Stay tuned for more as I get settled and dig in with my new team.

‘Nuff said.

-Blake Irving, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!

Use multiple passwords. You wouldn’t use the same key for you house, car and safe deposit box, would you? Using the same password on multiple websites is no different. Make sure to use separate passwords for your mail, banking and other sensitive online accounts. That way, if the unthinkable happens on another site, at least your Yahoo! mailbox remains secure.

Update your Web browser.  Today’s modern browsers have a host of features that can protect you from malicious activity and phishing sites. So if you’re still running Internet Explorer 6 because you think it’s cool to be old school, it’s time to upgrade. Always surf the web using an updated browser and install upgrades when prompted.

Check the FROM line. Scammers are getting really good at copying company logos, fonts and so on. So while the email might look legit, one dead giveaway is when a seemingly official message originates from a generic e-mail address. If your bank or another trusted business has something to say to you, the message won’t come from “Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.” Check the FROM address line in the message to help determine whether it is for real (including looking for spelling errors!).

Use common sense. If someone stopped you on the street and said you’ve inherited millions of dollars from a prince in a far off land, you’d probably ignore him and keep walking. We’ve all seen these emails – and they’re no different. Be extra suspicious of someone offering to send you money, or claims you’ve won a lottery or asks you to transfer money on their behalf. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Instead immediately click the “Spam” button on the suspicious message.

Educate yourself. These tips are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to staying safe online. To keep yourself up to date on the latest in computer protection, privacy and child safety tips, please visit Yahoo!’s Security Center at: http://security.yahoo.com/

Be safe and thank you for being a loyal Yahoo! member!

Jeff Russakow, EVP Customer Advocacy

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!

This is just one of the new features Huffington Post has enabled by tapping into our Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) platform. Y!OS is built on the idea that Yahoo! is more fun and personally relevant when we’re open to the best of the Web and when we make it easy for you to share and connect with who matters to you on Yahoo!. And in addition to letting you use your trusted Yahoo! ID on the Huffington Post, Y!OS technology is also powering two other great new features that are live today.

The first is Yahoo! Updates. Once you’ve logged into the Huffington Post with your Yahoo! ID, you’ll also be able to automatically share the comments you make there with your friends and contacts on popular products like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger.

The second is a new application for the Yahoo! Homepage that you can use to get a quick view into the hottest Huffington Post articles across 80 categories in a matter of seconds.

Finally, we’re also teaming up with the Huffington Post through Yahoo! News to feature and develop specialized articles, opinion pieces and reporting. Across Yahoo! we’re always looking for ways to bring you great content, whether it’s our own original reporting through our Yahoo! Newsroom Blogs, or from great sites like the Huffington Post, a leading voice in digital news.

To get started trying out these capabilities and sync up your Huffington Post and Yahoo! experiences, head over to the Huffington Post and click on the log in with Yahoo! ID button, install the new Huffington Post App on Yahoo.com or head straight to Yahoo! News.  Or better yet, try all three.

And if you run your own Web site and want to learn how to integrate with Yahoo!, check out our Yahoo! Developer Network and behind the scenes look at how Huffington Post did it. We’re excited to hear what you think.

Greg Cohn

Director of Strategy & Business Development for the Yahoo! Platform Technology Group

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:

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!

• 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

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

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.

• 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.

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Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor