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!

As citizens swarmed the Capitol Mall in record numbers to be within earshot of Tuesday’s historic presidential inauguration, they stormed the Internet in equal measure.

In fact, people with Obama fever broke records across Yahoo! News on Tuesday, seeking as much news and information as possible. Let’s take a look at why:

• Historic milestone – That’s the no-brainer. It seemed that whether or not Americans voted for President Obama, they appreciated the significance of inaugurating our first African-American president. Global interest in this American tradition was never higher.
• Net news rules – As the Pew Research Center reported in December, the Internet has surpassed newspapers and all other mediums except television for national and international news. And even that is destined to change, considering 6 in 10 people under age 30 prefer the Web to TV for news. As more people turned to the Web on Tuesday, we saw our highest traffic day ever on Yahoo! News, with 12.3 million unique visitors (the equivalent of the populations of New York City and Los Angeles combined) logging 329 million page views. These eye-popping figures beat our previous records around Hurricanes Katrina and Ike.
• Web video has arrived – Online video is no longer seen as a spotty, unreliable medium fraught with outages and buffering, as it might have been in 2000 and 2004. While hiccups can still happen, it seems people now confidently log on to live news coverage online knowing they won’t miss a thing. That was paramount on Tuesday because the inauguration and ensuing festivities fell during the workday for Americans. Yahoo! News upped our video server capacity as we logged record video streams, surpassing even Election Day coverage.
• Photos attract – People like news stories, but they can’t seem to get enough of photos – both news agency and user generated. On average, people viewed more than 70 images per person among our 56 inauguration-related slideshows (vs. our normal 40 photos per person). Not surprisingly, the most viewed set was of First Daughters Malia and Sasha. Over at Flickr, people tagged more than 150,000 photos and videos with terms related to the inauguration, along with those newly submitted to the Commons by partners like the Smithsonian that show historic images of past inaugurations.

As demand for online news continues to grow, our team will look for new ways to help you sort through the volume of news information and formats available. Who knows what the next record-breaking event will be?

But one thing’s for sure. It’s nice to see Internet news come of age.

Neeraj Khemlani
VP & GM, Yahoo! News

Thirty-nine years ago today, the Cardinals and Bruins set aside all rivalry when computer scientists at Stanford and UCLA created the first permanent link between their two shiny new ARPAnet routers — paving the way for modern networked computing and eventually the means for all of your tweets, pokes, LOLcats, and smileys. Here’s what we hooked you up with this week:

• T-Mobile triumph: If you’re a T-Mobile subscriber in the U.S., you’ll be spending a whole lot less time trying to find things with your mobile phone. That’s because Yahoo! oneSearch is now the default mobile search for T-Mobile’s new web2go service, serving up search results designed specifically for your cell phone. After all, it’s an awfully small screen and wading through a sea of links is downright irritating. More here.
• Sticky search: Faithful Product Pulse readers will remember when we unveiled Glue Pages in India, an experimental concept for search that sticks text, images, and video content together into a single results page. It’s now a U.S. import, available as a slightly different experience as Yahoo! Glue beta. It assembles content from across the Web into a veritable microsite about your query. Topics are limited for now (we’ll expand over time), but go check out how it handles popular people, places and things like cupcakes, Sarah Palin, Twilight, and Citigroup. More here.
• Feel-good news: Recession, deflation, layoffs, bank meltdowns. C’mon, isn’t there some good news out there? Why, yes, there is. And the good people at Sears want to make sure you see it. Head to Good News Now, a new video channel on Yahoo! News that sees the world through rose-colored glasses — spotlighting strictly uplifting stories in the news. You’ll find profiles of heroes, medical triumphs, baby Obamas, charitable neighbors, natural disaster survivors, and more. The channel will run through New Year’s. Maybe headlines will improve by January?
• Britney, Britney, Britney: Whether you’re a tabloid subscriber or just read copies at the dentist’s office, you’re all too familiar with the world’s fascination with Britney Spears. Well, the volume increases on Monday, when Yahoo! TV will premiere the exclusive trailer of MTV’s upcoming documentary, “Britney: For the Record.” Then we’ll spend the rest of the week gearing you up for Britney’s 27th birthday and the release of her new album “Circus” on December 2, with special coverage across Yahoo!. On Monday, check out “Britney’s 27 Wildest Moments” on Yahoo! Music; Friday, omg will share “Britney’s 25 Most Memorable Looks;” and next Sunday, Shine will take a look at Brit’s relationships. Mark your calendar!
• Big time in no time: And a final note… I’d like to congratulate the team behind Primetime in No Time, the show that gives you a rapid-fire recap of the TV you missed the night before. They’ve just served their 100 millionth stream since launching in March, becoming one of the most successful original programs in the history of the Internet. Hosted by comedian Frank Nicotero, the show is clearly addictive. w00t! More here.

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November 1 was an uneventful day for most people. But at Yahoo! News, editors had gathered in the newsroom on a sleepy Saturday morning to rehearse Election Night for a third and final time. Everyone was geared up for a prescribed role – following election calls by the Associated Press, mapping results as states rolled in, coordinating headlines with the homepage team, cranking out posts for our elections blog. A mock network commentator addressed the group, quickly shouting out poll results for 16 states coming in all at once. Everyone flew into action, processing swing and big-prize states and anticipating the top headlines.

In contrast to breaking news, it’s a luxury to prepare for a massive news event that falls on the calendar. And like a Guitar Hero tournament, we notched up the intensity the further we went along in the rehearsal. The goal? To create a setting as dramatic as Wolf Blitzer’s call of states on CNN to ensure that everyone was as prepared as possible to program what proved to be an historic night.

After covering the 2000 and 2004 elections at the New York Times, and watching news organizations all over the country make premature (and wrong) calls, I had just one rule for our team: “Get it right.” When you are the de facto news source for over 40 million a month, you feel a tremendous responsibility when it comes to accuracy.

To strike the right balance of keeping up with network calls without distributing misinformation, we spent time with editors from the AP before the election to understand their approach toward calling results, which is part science, part art, part gut call. You might remember the AP was the only news outlet that sent Americans to bed without a new president in 2000, saying the race was too close to call.

At Yahoo! News, our editors’ roles are to program headlines from dozens of national and international newspapers, wires, and broadcast networks. But on Election Night, we took on a more pronounced mandate as news filter. For example, if a network called a critical swing state, we would wait until at least another network called the state before announcing the news in our breaking news blog and breaking news bar. After all, we were serving what turned out to a record-breaking audience — today, comScore confirmed that we attracted 7.5 million people, the largest single day of traffic in online news history, surpassing CNN.com, MSNBC.com, AOL.com and FoxNews.com. We couldn’t afford to be wrong.

Journalists are known cynics. But when Barack Obama surpassed 270 electoral votes, we all knew it was a huge moment. The newsroom suddenly got very quiet. The sense of history was palpable. I think we all felt honored to be standing there, passing that word along to our readers.

And in my eight years at the Times — where I covered 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — I was never more proud of a newsroom operation.

Richard Vega
Senior Editor, Yahoo! News

Photo from jrejtman

In five days, our country (and no doubt many others) will be transfixed by — nay, obsessed with — Election Day.

Will we have our first African American president or our first female vice president? Who will be tasked with leading us out of these economic doldrums? Who will decide the fate of the war on terror? Who will solve the health care crisis and stop our addiction to oil?

If you’re an undecided voter or just want to make sure you’re watching this race to the finish, you might want to go live on Yahoo! Elections until November 4th. Even I was surprised by how jam-packed it is with helpful information. In addition to the latest news, you’ll find poll results, opinions and editorials, videos, the most blogged-about stories, great interactive modules like the Political Dashboard and Electoral College predictors, a candidate truth-o-meter, and a tally of newspaper endorsements.

And then there’s the fun stuff, like the campaign button you can put on your blog, candidate photos on Flickr, and a political quiz to see how much you’ve kept up with what the campaigns have said about each other. And don’t miss the “Create Your Scenario” feature in the Dashboard, which lets you try your hand at punditry and predict the election night outcome. Save it and compare it to calls by the likes of Arianna Huffington, Joe Trippi, and Newt Gingrich or even past elections. Sounds like a ballot party activity!

And if you’re like me, living in a state with its usual crushing number of propositions and referendums to decipher, you’ll appreciate the site’s “state” tab, which leads you to the latest wire headlines, local news and broadcast news for your locale.

Speaking of which, if you live in California, here’s a brief parenthetical. As you probably know, Proposition 8 is a proposed constitutional amendment that would overturn the state supreme court’s May decision to legalize same-sex marriage. More than 50 of Silicon Valley’s top leaders have given their personal support to No on Prop 8. Our own Jerry Yang, David Filo, Sue Decker, and Hilary Schneider are joining executives from organizations like Google, Intuit, Facebook, eBay, Cisco, Federated Media, Adobe, Reunion.com, Shopping.com, Sequoia Capital, and Twitter. They believe taking away rights from one group of people would set our state – and our country – back in the fight for fundamental fairness and equal rights. To learn more, head to pride.yahoo.com.

What seems like the longest campaign marathon in history will soon come to an end – along with the vitriol about socialism, terrorists, Caribou Barbies, mavericks, and sneaky tax policies. Hope, change. Reform, victory. Are you ready? Get out and vote!

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Bless the pocket protector — it’s National Techies Day! A time to thank your favorite geeks for everything they do for you — whether it’s ridding your laptop of foul vectors, building super cool products you couldn’t live without, or helping you find the “any” key. You’d be staring at the blue screen of death without them. Here’s what our beloved nerds contributed to the world this week:

• Searching for a president: With just 32 days to go until the next POTUS is decided, there’s no time to mess around. That’s why Yahoo! Search has launched a series of elections shortcuts. Want the latest on a particular candidate? Type in “Obama” or “McCain” and you’ll find links to the latest news, videos, photos, discussions, and poll results. Or type in “presidential election” for general updates as well as a link to register to vote. Curious about the contest from a state’s perspective? Type in “Iowa presidential election” and get the latest headlines and polling info for that state. More here.
• Mad dash to the finish line: Speaking of election polls and whatnot, Yahoo! News just updated its political dashboard. Just in time for the election’s home stretch, you can now see how the average poll numbers have trended over time, on a national and state-by-state basis. How has Obama fared in Ohio to date? Is McCain tracking up or down in Florida? Check it out and see if this race will be a photo finish.
• Cut to the chase: If there’s one thing we can thank the Internet for, it’s a short attention span. That’s why the new Yahoo! News beta, launched as an opt-in today, gives you just the first five paragraphs of a news story. Want more? It’s just a click away, although most people seem to drive on — proving the value of the news pyramid. (NB: If you’re a newshound getting your fix via news.yahoo.com, you’ll always get the full article.) You’ll also find relevant links to other stories and videos much higher on the page. And Yahoo! News is getting more and more open, providing links to outside sources like local newspapers, other news providers and bloggers through the Buzztracker tool. Was that short enough for you?
• Flickr’s mobile makeover: Attention iPhone-toting photographers: The new and improved mobile Flickr site (http://m.flickr.com) is now especially gorgeous for you too-cool-for-skool types. The site’s been refreshed with clearer navigation controls and puts your recent activity front and center. You can also browse sets more efficiently, thanks to arrow-topped thumbnails that help you move back and forth between photos. Trust me — it’s worth making room to your home screen.

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Ever wanted to be a political pundit and call the shots on how the presidential election will play out? Ever wanted to “get behind the numbers” and understand why certain states are leaning this way or that? With the launch of our new and improved General Election Political Dashboard, you too can be the next James Carville. We’re excited about the launch and why not? More than 50% of voters now get their election news and information online — and more of them from Yahoo! News than anywhere else!

For the General Election, we’ve kept all of the cool features from the Primary Political Dashboard –- plus some new bells and whistles sure to enthrall the political junkie in all of us. At a glance, users still can see national and state poll averages and market predictions on the presidential prospects for Barack Obama and John McCain. Also, users can check out a new form of polling… candidate search results and popular search terms for each candidate. (It’s no surprise the most commonly search words for Barack Obama in recent days has been Joe Biden, but Jill Biden also has seen a big spike.) Users then can quickly scroll over each state to get a snapshot on how candidates are doing, or they can click on specific state to get key local headlines, state-wide searches, and voter demographic breakdowns. They also can click on the candidate images to pull up bios and campaign fund-raising totals. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

The new dashboard also includes a bevy of “Most Blogged About” election topics –- the first time BuzzTracker has been integrated into a Yahoo! News tool (stay tuned for more) — and gives users the chance to check out not only high-level blogs from a national standpoint, but also blogs from individual states. Who knew New Hampshire had so many bloggers writing about the election?

The “Create Your Scenario” tool allows anyone to make a call on every state based on the dashboard content and publish that content using a permalink in an email or blog. Essentially, we’ve put the power of the political pundits in your hands. Will Ohio go to Obama or McCain? Will Florida go blue or stay red? Take a stab at the electoral college and see how the numbers add up (remember: 270 electoral votes are needed to win the White House.) For inspiration, you can view celebrity scenarios (check out Arianna Huffington’s picks) and current and past election results. You can also compare your results to others to see where differences reside!

This Presidential Election truly marks a turning point — where distribution of information and content is no longer controlled by a few networks but rather can be created, consumed, and mashed up by the voters themselves. The Political Dashboard has been developed with you, the voter, in mind.

Have fun and enjoy the new features as we head into final few months of this historic election.

Alan Warms
Vice President and General Manager, Yahoo! News, Tech and Education

I’ve had the most amazing experience the past 12 days in Seoul, Korea.

The highlight, of course, was the Yahoo! exclusive interview with South Korean President Myung-bak Lee. This was a historic event as it was President Lee’s first interview with an online news organization and the first foreign head of state ever interviewed by Yahoo! News.

So how did all of this come about? The success of Yahoo! News’ interview of President Bush (in partnership with Politico) got the wheels turning. Interviewing President Bush spurred discussions within Yahoo! over which other world leaders we could get to sit down with us. I’m eternally indebted to Yahoo! Korea CEO James Kim, whose entire team did a tremendous job of pursuing the issue with the Blue House and then executing a highly complex operation in a very short period of time.

It was a great honor for me to get to go to the Blue House, the President’s residence, and meet with President Lee, who was very gracious and generous with his time. I asked President Lee questions about a variety of topics, from the ultra-serious issue of relations with North Korea to lighter fare such as the success of South Korea’s Olympians. I also asked a question from a user after Y! Korea asked for submissions from its users (there were literally 1000s to choose from). The discussion of North-South relations was particularly relevant for me since my father is a Korean War veteran.

One of the other highlights of my trip to Korea was a visit to the DMZ, which is an amazing place on many levels. The DMZ is both a literal and figurative ‘front line’ for a war that technically isn’t over, but it’s also a place where sworn enemies have figured out a way to coexist –- and even partner in a joint economic development project in the area. That gives me some hope President Lee will be right when he expressed confidence reunification will occur in his lifetime — and possibly suddenly as was the case with the reunification of Germany.

As for the rest of my trip, I was struck by the advanced technology available to the “average” Korean. From video conferencing on cell phones, to GPS devices that double as TVs to high-speed Internet access anywhere/anytime, Korea is one of the world’s most wired countries. I got insights on the scene from several tech industry executives and also met the world champion Starcraft player (video games are a huge spectator sport in Korea) — stay tuned to “Tech Ticker” for additional clips from those interviews.

Finally, I was blown away by the incredible hospitality and generosity of the people I met. Everyone I met was amazingly friendly and helpful — from colleagues at Yahoo! to local CEOs to a friend of a friend’s brother who took a day off to show me around Seoul, to the little girl at the Korean Folk Village who wanted to practice her English.

My only regret is I didn’t get to try live octopus (a local delicacy), but apparently it’s not in season. Next time!

Aaron Task
Correspondent, Yahoo! Tech Ticker

It’s been a big week for us at Yahoo! News.

You might have heard — we interviewed the President. George W. Bush, in the flesh, at the White House.

And, the best part? We made history. Believe it or not, this was the first on-camera interview the President has done for an online-only entity in his entire tenure in office. As we say in the news biz — what a “get”!

The White House was kind enough to let us conduct the interview in the Roosevelt Room — the President has only done one other on-camera interview there. It’s feet from the Oval Office and is usually used as a conference room (think cabinet meetings).

The White House says “President Richard Nixon named the room in 1969 to honor Theodore Roosevelt for building the West Wing and Franklin Roosevelt for expanding it.” Teddy’s Medal of Honor and Nobel Peace Prize hang on walls a few feet away from the large picture of him at the end of the room. All fine reminders that this was an historic event.

The interview was conducted by Mike Allen, the chief political correspondent for Politico (our Election 2008 partners). Our first-class production team shot the interview. Our exec producer and vice president of original programming, Neeraj Khemlani, came with us to oversee the whole production. (He used to work at 60 Minutes. Take a look at the interview — you can tell he had a hand in it. It looked sharp!)

The idea of interviewing Mr. Bush started when our friends and partners at Politico joined forces with us to cover the 2008 campaign. Eventually, we were interviewing presidential candidates (see interviews here) with Mike Allen. Then we were writing stories on the primaries. And ultimately, we’re hosting their first-class content on our site. We wondered what big “get” we could do next — all signs pointed to the White House.

We took a good look at our audience when we decided just what we’d ask President Bush when we sat down with him. Of our 40 million users, we were pretty sure not all of them are watching Meet the Press every week. So we posed a broad range of questions, touching on everything from the war in Iraq (and why it spurred him to quit golf) to his daughter’s wedding to which Saturday Night Live comedian pulled off the best impression. (It goes without saying that as Yahoo!, we can get away with questions that are outside Tim Russert’s domain.) We even got a Dr. Evil impression out of him. We also asked questions submitted by users, like whether he felt personally misled by pre-war Iraq intelligence and what he could do about the rising price of gas.

No matter which aspect of this President people were interested in, we’re proud to have brought it to you from a special place in a special format.

Erin Green
Producer, Yahoo! News

This afternoon, a diverse group of more than 150 journalists, technologists, and entrepreneurs will descend on our campus for this year’s Silicon Valley meeting of Journalism That Matters: NewsTools2008. Although one might question the wisdom of having media on our campus during a week like this, we’re excited to host this 3-day gathering of kindred spirits, to foster discussion and collaboration between content creators (writers, editors, publishers, bloggers) and content enablers (developers, tool makers, entrepreneurs).

The focus of this event is to explore how new technologies and business models can support journalism and participatory democracy through a “concept/design mash-up.” This is a natural fit for us at Yahoo! — providing the platform for others to convene, share ideas and insights, and discover new ways to make a difference. Discussion topics will include how the concept and practice of journalism may adapt to search and social networks, crowdsourcing, diverse, fragmented audiences and digital, participatory politics. It’s all about best practices and new technologies that can facilitate fact/data-rich, citizen-supported, machine-using, inclusive journalism that promotes accountable government and open institutions.

I’ve been at Yahoo! since we were just a handful of people building a searchable directory of websites. From the beginning, we’ve been driven by sheer passion and enthusiasm for the transformative possibilities of the Web — we couldn’t wait to make it accessible to everyone, because we knew amazing things would happen when others applied their creativity, resourcefulness, and ingenuity. We’ve never had all the answers — the website directory was just a bunch of links to other people’s stuff — but we brought those links together to invite and inspire others to realize the possibilities of this medium.

Promoting freedom of expression and the open exchange of diverse ideas and information — that’s been at the core of everything we do. We believe information is power, and access to information is a democratizing force. And even though we started out merely linking to “other people’s stuff,” we thought a lot about how the mere act of aggregation is creation, and with that comes great responsibility. These very beliefs are at the heart of “journalism that matters.”

It’s these same beliefs, together with our passion for helping others apply their expertise to unlock the power of the Web, that drives our focus on making Yahoo! more open and social. We are creating flexible tools and platforms for others to build on, and look forward to working with like-minded collaborators in an evolving community.

To that end, several members of our news, front page, and central editorial teams will be in attendance this week. As always, we don’t have all the answers. But we can’t wait to see what emerges when we come together with those who do.

Srinija Srinivasan
VP and Editor-in-Chief
Yahoo! Editorial