What is Open Hack Day? It’s what happens when clever web developers, a wireless connection, a host of web services, and massive quantities of caffeine, pizza and donuts come together for an all-night code-a-thon. After 24 hours, creative coders show off their mashup wares and clever apps, American Idol-style, before a panel of distinguished judges, who bestow awards, praise, and lots of geek cred.

Ever since the first Open Hack Day back in 2006, we’ve made it a priority to be as open and accessible to developers as possible. Yahoo!’s audience is global – and so is the base of developers who value our open tools,technologies and vast user base. We’ve hosted Open Hack Days in the U.K., India, Brazil, and Taiwan; next month, we’ll meet with developers, designers, and entrepreneurs from New York’s vibrant Web technology and digital media scene.

We’ll kick off the weekend with a Friday morning keynote from Internet guru and NYU professor Clay Shirky. That’s followed by a full day of tech talks, panel conversations, and hands-on workshops that cover the latest Yahoo! developer tools and services. Yahoo!’s open platforms let developers build things that anyone can use on and off Yahoo!: Flickr toys, Connected TV Widgets, and open apps that you can install for Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, and more. On Friday evening, we’ll kick off the hack contest and hold our breath to see what’s built by Saturday afternoon. And in-between, we’ll host a special Open Hack edition of Ignite NYC — a geek’s open mic.

What will take this year’s prize? A moblogging purse, a phenomenal way to share and organize your photos in Yahoo! Mail, an iPhone orchestra, or something we haven’t even thought of yet?

To get a better sense of the Open Hack Day showdown, check out Ricky Montalvo’s “Hackumentary,” a short film documentary shot during last year’s event in Sunnyvale. Here’s the trailer:

Hack Day – a hackumentary short film from ricky montalvo on Vimeo.

Head over to http://www.icanhaz.com/yahoohacknyc to register, check out the wiki, or follow us (@ydn) on Twitter for updates. Let the countdown to Open Hack Day 2009 begin!

Chris Yeh
Head of the Yahoo! Developer Network

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tapan Bhat
SVP, Integrated Consumer Experiences

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

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tapan Bhat
SVP, Integrated Consumer Experiences, Yahoo!

Today we’re beginning to roll out what we’re calling a “smarter inbox,” a more open and social Yahoo! Mail helps you better keep up with the information and people you care about most. The new Welcome Page surfaces messages based on people who are most relevant to you, letting you designate your preferred connections and automatically prioritizing messages so you see theirs first. We’ll also suggest more connections to you based on the people you already know.

Also, based on our new universal profile service, we let you see your connections’ activity updates across Yahoo!, such as the stories they’ve buzzed, the hotels they’ve reviewed on Yahoo! Travel, or shows they’ve rated on Yahoo! TV. In the future, those updates will come from things people are doing across the Web outside of Yahoo!. People today are communicating and connecting with others in various ways, from email, to blogs, to real-time messages. The Updates feature brings together these web activities together in one place to allow you to stay up to speed on a range of your connections’ activities and interests.

We’re also letting you do more in your e-mail experience by bringing third-party applications into Yahoo! Mail – a tremendous milestone for us. We’re just beginning a limited beta test, starting with applications like Flixter (share movie time, trailers and reviews), WordPress (post photos and links to a blog from your inbox), Xoopit (see and share all the photos stored in e-mail, including attachments and links to photo sharing sites, in one organized and consolidated “photo view” of the inbox.), and Yahoo! services like Flickr and Yahoo! Greetings – letting you get a lot more done from within your inbox. We expect developers from the Web’s top brands to build apps that we can integrate next year. Call it our new open way of life – unlocking popular Yahoo! products and letting outside developers create great new experiences for our users.

We are rolling out our smarter inbox in a phased process. Select Yahoo! Mail users in the U.S. and Australia will start seeing the new Welcome Page with messages from their connections, starting today. A more limited group of users in the U.S. will begin beta testing the open applications today. We plan to merge the social and open features into one Yahoo! Mail experience in the first half of 2009. You can read more on our Yahoo! Mail blog.

We’ve also made enhancements to My Yahoo! and the Yahoo! Toolbar to help you get more done. Starting today, you’ll be able to add third-party apps to your My Yahoo! homepage, beginning with a limited selection – like a calorie counter and apps that lets you fuel your addiction to “The Office” and “Heroes” — with more to come as developers explore our Yahoo! Application Platform. Read more on our Yahoo! Developer Network blog and the My Yahoo! blog. And we’re offering a sneak preview later this week of a new Yahoo! Toolbar (Windows IE only for now) that features the same apps we’re testing on our new homepage– you can check for email from Yahoo! and other popular e-mail providers, monitor and search for eBay items, and find local movie showtimes. You’ll also get personal search suggestions and be alerted when one of your connections has an activity update.

All this is part of our new Yahoo! Open Strategy, a major undertaking that opens Yahoo! to the creativity and innovation of outside developers and publishers like never before, while unlocking the latent social network that exists on Yahoo!. This is really just the beginning of what we have planned as we put you at the center of the best of the Web, wherever that may be.

Ash Patel
Executive Vice President, Audience Product Division

Today that vision takes another important step forward. We’re officially cutting the ribbon for talented developers everywhere, who are now welcome to come in and access our tools and data so they can build applications for a more customized, social, and relevant Yahoo! network and beyond.

I won’t bore you with the plumbing — you can head over to our developer network for those details — but let me summarize the potential impact on you the user as developers dig in and begin to build their applications.

Most obvious will be the social aspects. At a high level, we’re rolling out a social platform that will draw on the hundreds of millions of connections on Yahoo! – everything from random encounters with someone who commented on the same photo as you, to deep connections you have with friends who know nearly everything about you. By using the social contacts you already have on Yahoo! — through Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Finance, Fantasy Sports, etc. — we’ll make those social connections more active and useful. Most importantly, by enabling developers to make your social connections specific to the Yahoo! service you’re using, we believe you’ll enjoy some incredibly unique and creative new experiences that we would never have thought of.

There’s really no limit to the potential, but here are a few examples:

• Share updates and discover new things online: You’ll be able to see what your friends are doing on Yahoo! (like entering ratings on Yahoo! Movies or buzzing articles on Yahoo! Buzz) and off our network (like the blog post they just commented on, photo they’ve uploaded, movie they’ve rented, or the restaurant they just reviewed). And on the flip side, you can share your activities with them, helping them stay in touch with you more easily. Basically, we’re letting developers centralize anything you do on the Web as an update on our platform — with your explicit permission, of course. And it will be that much easier to discover great new things through the people and relationships most relevant to you. (Who knew that Uncle Jim loved “When Harry Met Sally” so much?) And publishers love this because they get exposed to more visitors whose friends implicitly recommend their content.
• A universal profile: We’ve begun the process of consolidating everyone’s Yahoo! experience onto a new, single profile so that everyone has a control panel — a central place where they can manage the new “open” applications that they decide to use and the social connections they have across Yahoo!.
• Make your Address Book truly portable: You can make your address book available to an online merchant so you can more easily ship friends a gift, or be reminded when it’s time to send them an online birthday card. Even beyond the Address Book, we’ve built the whole system with the mentality that any personal data that you put into Yahoo! is inherently your data; you own it, and you can give it to anyone or take it anywhere you would like.
• Customize Yahoo! like never before: Want to track your eBay auction? Is CNN your favorite news outlet? What’s next in your Netflix queue? Pull them all into the Yahoo! homepage so you can see everything that’s important to you in one place. We’ll open select properties like My Yahoo!, Mail and our front page so that you can let third-party applications become part of those sites as you see fit.
• Find and connect with new people: Based on whom you already know and interact with — on Yahoo! and off — we’ll make suggestions for more people to add to your social circle. And we’ll help you prioritize all of your connections, particularly as they communicate with you in Yahoo! Mail.

We’ve done all of this in a way that keeps Yahoo! as safe and secure as ever, while also building in full privacy and permission control so you’ll have complete control over things like what you broadcast publicly and what information you share with third-party sites, etc.

As of today, developers can start using our newly available data on their own web sites and even start deploying new applications into Yahoo!. You won’t find these externally developed applications built into your favorite Yahoo! service just yet — that’s coming soon. But starting today, you could discover new apps either by invitation from a friend or by noticing via your Profile or Messenger updates feed that a connection is using the app.

Reaching this step in our Yahoo! Open Strategy has been a significant effort, requiring hundreds of developers in offices around the world. We’ve even worked hand-in-hand with Google, MySpace, and many other of our traditional competitors as partners in this effort. We mean it when we say we’re open!

Like any initiative that thrives on the ingenuity of third party developers, we expect our open platforms to evolve and improve based on their feedback. This is very much an initial release. But we’re anxious to see what developers out there have up their sleeves and what you’ll do with it.

Jay Rossiter
Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Open Strategy

That’s why we’ve been hard at work integrating a new social foundation into Yahoo!. Today, as part of this, we’re upgrading profiles.yahoo.com with a new universal profile. Available in beta to all of our users around the world, Yahoo! Profiles is a centralized control panel that lets you manage your identity, activities, interests, and connections across Yahoo! — and eventually the entire Web. The new profile is a key element of our Yahoo! Open Strategy, rewiring Yahoo! to make it more open and social.

I want to make it clear that this new profile is not intended to be a new social destination on Yahoo!. Rather, our plan is to integrate “social” as a central dimension into the services you use every day. For example, if you’re on Yahoo! Messenger 9.0, you’re already seeing Yahoo! Buzz, Mybloglog, and Twitter updates as part of your friends’ status messages. Soon you’ll see social capabilities added elsewhere across Yahoo!, beginning with places where you start your day. The new homepage we’re testing will soon have an application that lets you stay up to date with what your friends are doing across the Web. And Yahoo! Mail will be delivering a smarter inbox, displaying emails from your most important connections first.

As you set up your new profile, you’ll see that we’re starting out with the basics. You can enter information about yourself (location, work experience, interests, photo, etc.) and add connections from your Yahoo! Address Book. As we start adding social capabilities to services like the Yahoo! homepage, Mail, and Messenger, your profile information will be used as the trusted source of identity and social preferences. This will be extended across the Web as developers begin using the open APIs we’re offering as part of our Yahoo! Open Strategy, allowing them to build more social experiences based on your preferences. (Note: The updated profile will not immediately be used by Yahoo! 360. More details are explained here.)

Ultimately, our goal is to unify your social experience and connections not only on Yahoo!, but anywhere you travel across the Web. Rolling out the new profile today is a just first step, and I look forward to sharing more details with you in the coming months as we “light up” social experiences at Yahoo!.

Jim Stoneham
Vice President, Communities