Nine years ago today, the first blueprint of the human being emerged as the Human Genome Project released a first draft of a fully sequenced human genome. All hail the double helix! Since then, scientists have used it to screen for various illnesses and link genes with specific diseases. Here’s what we decoded this week:

• Toolbar tricks: Now, every browser comes with a toolbar, so why would you want the new one from Yahoo!? Does yours let you preview your email or content from more than 100 popular sites? Does it give you query suggestions as you search? Does it let you search directly within sites like Flickr or Wikipedia? I didn’t think so. Go download yourself the new Yahoo! Toolbar. It’s all about letting you do more faster. More here.
• Making the little guy feel big: If you own a small business, you know how much you covet the marketing dollars of the big dogs. Well, the playing field has officially been leveled. Our new My Display Ads let businesses of any size run affordable online display (or banner) campaigns that reach local markets on Yahoo!. How affordable? Let’s just say we can make thirty bucks go a long way. These self-service ads are easy to create – just pick from one of our 800+ templates; customize text, images, colors and add your company logo; select your target audience; and off you go. You’re guaranteed to feel embiggened. More here.
• Proud to have Pride: It’s LGBT Pride month and we’re doing it up big with this year’s Yahoo! Pride site. We’ve got news from the Advocate, a killer timeline that summarizes the last century in gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender history, and an event finder for more than 1,000 Pride events around the world. But best of all, we might be sending you and a friend to Sydney for the LGBT Mardi Gras in February. But hurry, you have to enter by July 1st (or come meet us in San Francisco this weekend to enter in person). More here.
• Dog days of summer: The race is on and you’ve got about 11 weeks to make the most of it. It’s summertime and we’ve pulled together a little helpful microsite to keep you from squandering it. Need help with travel plans? Check out articles on getaways that involve beachs, golf, family, national park, or weekend furloughs. Want great recipes? We’ve got ideas for grilling, oven-free cooking, drinks, and chill-out treats. There’s also shopping ideas, tips on keeping that lawn green, kids activities, and giving your Avatar a more sunswept look. Check it out here.

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Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Yahoo! Toolbar has always made navigating the web easier –- acting as a shortcut to search and as a way to keep track of your favorite Yahoo! sites. While that still holds true, we have noticed that people want more functionality from their toolbar, so today we are excited to share a new Yahoo! Toolbar –- one that makes it easier to stay on top of your online world no matter where you are on the web.

The new Yahoo! Toolbar now offers greater customization and more immediate access to the information you care about most from across the entire web – not just Yahoo! sites. Currently available if you’re using Internet Explorer 6+ and now for Firefox (as a beta), too, our new toolbar also helps you do some really handy things, including:

• Preview and Go: Most of us have sites we check every day –- sometimes more than once. Now you can preview information from your favorite sites directly within your toolbar. Small previews drop down from your toolbar, giving you real-time information without ever having to leave the page you’re on. Customize your toolbar with dozens of apps from Yahoo! and across the rest of the web, so you can check on your multiple email inboxes (Yahoo! and AOL), your eBay listings, the latest news from People.com or USA Today, stock portfolios, and even your local weather or movie showtimes.
• Search Faster: One of the most popular features on toolbars is search. So, we’ve created a better, more efficient way for you to conduct web searches (with the help of some cool technology from Inquisitor). The search box in your Yahoo! Toolbar now offers query suggestions, recall of sites based on your recent search history, and the ability to directly search other web sites, like Flickr and Wikipedia — right from the search box. It’s a real time saver!

By bringing the best of the web together in one place, we want to make the web work better for you – right from within your toolbar. Get started by downloading the new Yahoo! Toolbar at http://toolbar.yahoo.com/.

Burke Culligan
Senior Director, Yahoo! Front Doors

There’s no question that the Internet has made life more productive and helped people do a better job of staying connected. But sometimes it feels more curse than blessing when you’re dealing with inbox overload (relevant fact = 100 billion email messages are sent every day!), unwieldy amounts of social connections, and the growing number of websites you have to visit to get things done. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about technologies that can ease the pain while also helping you do more things at once.

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