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)

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 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

Born out of our acquisition of IndexTools in May, Yahoo! Web Analytics (beta) provides powerful data and insights reporting that help website owners evaluate their marketing performance and tweak their website designs. They’ll get custom real-time reports and graphs that help them slice and dice metrics like sales, page views, and sources of traffic and ultimately identify ways to amp up their visitor satisfaction.

We’re rolling the service out in phases for the remainder of 2008 and into next year. The first big deployment is Yahoo! Small Business, whose 13,000 hosted e-commerce customers can get set up just in time for the holiday shopping season at the click of a button. We have already started to roll Yahoo! Web Analytics out to advertisers who seek Yahoo!’s help to build custom micro-sites, as well as to third-party application developers who build widgets and other mini-apps for Yahoo! users via our developer network or our new Yahoo! Open Strategy tools.

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For more information, please visit http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/ and check out the FAQ.

Jitendra Kavathekar
VP, Yahoo! Web Analytics