Yahoo’s goals

1. Become the starting point for the most consumers
2. Become the must-buy for advertisers
3. Deliver open, industry-leading platforms that attract the most publishers and developers

Isn’t that the goal of most web based companies? Either way, good for Yahoo! and good for all the announcements below:

• More Ways to Upload

• Are Words Failing You? (Crosswords)
• A Day in Their Shoes

• More themes ready and waiting

• IM from My Yahoo!.

• Stats for the iFlickr iPhone app
• 2007 University Hack Day Season: Game On!

• Where does Yahoo! head next?
• Explore the world with Flickr
• Get a clue (Crossword Puzzle Community)
• Big thinking with a Pop!
• Product Pulse – October 19, 2007

Latest Yahoo! Application Gallery Additions:

• WeGoAll – WeGoAll creates fraternity and sorority websites. Our content management system helps promote fraternity and sorority chapters by enabling them to professionally present themselves online. WeGoAll makes it easy for organizations to have a great website with a lot of features: news, events, profiles, accept donations, sell items, search, pictures, calendars, groups, and much more. WeGoAll also helps organizations to facilitate communication with potential new members and current members. We offer unlimited storage of photos and files thanks to Amazon S3.
• Gears In Motion – Gears in Motion is a user interface that allows you to easily manage your google gears databases. It can be easily added to the development versions of your applications.
• Social Routing – This application is a maps hack that uses the traffic APIs to show you how likely it is to arrive some place in time. As the really cool social extra it also interfaces with twitter to allow for your friends or “people in the field” to report street blockages and gridlock as and where they occur and offers shortcuts and alternatives based on the wisdom of the community using the app.
• myZen – myZen allows you to connect to Flickr from your mobile phone. You can see your own photos, see your contact photos, see interesting and most recent upload to Flickr. Uh, you can also directly upload photos taken from your mobile to your Flickr account automatically! And, and you can read and write comments on those photos – all from your mobile. No longer you need to run to your PC to do everything

• The Other Half of the Search Equation
• Take a Tour of the New Yahoo! Search 
• Yahoo! oneSearch Gets More Knowledgeable

• “Make Me a Liam” Contest on Bix!
• Yahoo! Mail Turns 10!

• Improved: Personal Assistant
• Halloween Treats for your page.

• Combining Tagspaces with Yahoo! Pipes
• Hello from Open Hack Day Bangalore
• Open Hackday Update: Hack submission started
• Results of the Open Hack Day Bangalore 2007

Weekly Roundups from Yodel Anecdotal:

• Product Pulse – October 12, 2007
• Product Pulse – October 5, 2007

Latest Yahoo! Application Gallery Additions:

• digestr – A simple tool for generating rss digests out of flickr photos.
• WebSite Force Checker – Tool shows complex info for selected page: Google page rank Indexed pages in Google, MSN, Yahoo, AllTheWeb, Altavista.
• PiciShare – A Flickr Search Engine – PiciShare is a great alternative to your average Flickr Search. The search engine provides a simple click and search interface that enables the end user to modify search preferences more efficiently. PiciShare A Flickr Search Engine. Show off your favorite photos to the world, securely and privately show photos to your friends and family.
• Y! Friends – Add and remove yahoo IDs to the MAP, check the status of your friends in the neighborhood based on the address/zip/city.
• Precinct Maps – Application for user to find not only their local New York City police precinct, but which precinct they reside in.

Not that it’s such a big change, it’s actually pretty sexy. Take a look at mine:

Related Posts:

• Yahoo Gives an Update – When Will YOU Have the All-New Mail
• Yahoo! Mail Beta Rollout Might take 6 Weeks for Some (August 31st)

• Say goodbye to eBay & PayPal fraudsters (YodelAnecdotal)
• Yahoo! steps up their Spam Game with DomainKeys. Definitely the next wave in E-mail security
• Know your neighborhood. (My Yahoo! Blog)
• Visual Maps Feeds (Restaurants, Events, etc)
• Liam Gets a Workout in the New Mail (Yahoo! Mail Blog)
• Liam, you know that guy with the hula hood and soccer ball is now all over the new Yahoo! Mail
• TV fans: you spoke, we listened! (My Yahoo! Blog)
• Better and smart TV Listings, I’m excited

Yahoo Developer News:

• Checking In from Adobe MAX – Yahoo gets a little cozy with Adobe

New Yahoo! Applications in the Gallery:

• BharatMatrimony Inbox – BharatMatrimony members can access their Inbox New Mails and Express Interest Received from Yahoo! Messenger itself
• Yahoo Music Engine Lyrics Search – This is a plugin for the Yahoo Music Engine. Upon song changing (if selected), lyrics will automatically be searched for using google. Can use multiple search sites as well. This plugin also allows searching through google (Google is the home page).

Here are a few photos taken at yesterday’s internal launch party for the new Yahoo! Search. After many sleepless nights, it’s great to see some of the positive reactions from users. Now that we’ve had a few celebratory drinks — the Yahootini was quite popular — we’re back to working on more new features and improvements. Stay tuned and keep sending us your feedback and ideas.

 Launch Party at the “Search Bar” (via Yahoo! Search Blog)

1. Yahoo!’s blogs run off of Google’s FeedBurner
2. New Yahoo! Web Search Page:

Perhaps similar to the simplicity of Google Web Search?

Hmmm, Way to Go Yahoo! or Way to Go Google? Now I’m just confused…

So, great for Yahoo! for doing stuff that makes searching more complicated but more informational! Wooo! Seems like the reviewers aren’t as excited as I am, but I’m just happy that my name is still #1 in the search results! BooYah!

The New Yahoo! Search from Yahoo!:

• From “To Do” to “Done” in One Search (Yahoo! Search Blog)
• The new Yahoo! Search (Yodel Anecdotal)

Yahoo Search Announcement Reviews:

• Search Optimization Guide for The New Yahoo! Search (Search Engine Journal)
• Yahoo Search Launches Google Killer : Search Assist, Videos, Flickr Integration (Search Engine Journal)
• Yahoo! upgrades search and guess what?… “it Still Sucks” (Crunch Gear)
• Search Engines: Yahoo Upgrades Its Web Search (LifeHacker)
• Yahoo Search Just Got Smarter (TechCrunch)

Other Yahoo! News:

• Stewart Butterfield: Flickr founder to leave Yahoo (ValleyWag)
• Shameless self-promotion… Yodel Anecdotal on Top 100 Tech Meme

New Yahoo! Applications:

• flauntR – “flauntR is a free online photo editor and effects software. Apply 1000s of digital photo effects to your images with just one click. Get images directly from FlickR or your PC. Use the online photo album feature for photo storage, and access your albums online. Share your creations by email, edit pictures online for embedding on your web page and blog.”
• YUI Lightbox – “There are a number of Lightbox applications out there based on jQuery, prototype and scriptaculous. But I wasn’t able to find a similar product built on the YUI library, which in my opinion, is by far the best out there. So I started out creating a simple Lightbox. Right now there are gallery and standard modes, you can chose modal or not and there is a dragable option.”

Yahoo! Search Marketing is making some moves recently. They realize that Google is winning the race, Microsoft is making moves/catching up and Yahoo! hangs somewhere in between for the 3 major players. So, Yahoo! added more control, which personally I think is going to be a crucial benefit to Yahoo! Search Marketing. This was taken directly from an e-mail…

What you need to know…

• Block your ads from up to 250 web sites
• Works with Sponsored Search and Content Match
• Block sites on your entire account
• Complements pricing discounts

As an advertiser, you want quality traffic—qualified clicks from the users who are most likely to become customers. Our new blocked domains feature, planned for launch later this month, will provide you with greater control of where your ads appear. This is just one of several ways that Yahoo! is working to improve the value of the traffic that we deliver to you.

Blocked Domains (New!) – Now you can specify websites in our partner distribution network where you don’t want your ads to appear.

Pricing Discounts – You may automatically receive pricing discounts based on our assessment of the quality of traffic coming from our partner distribution network.

Click Protection System – We track click and search patterns across many data points to identify clicks that we believe shouldn’t be billed to our advertisers. The click protection system generally discards charges from 12 percent to 15 percent of clicks.

Blocked Continents – Yahoo! automatically excludes traffic from continents other than North America. If global traffic is important to your business, you can opt into this traffic.

Traffic Quality Center – This site is our home for traffic quality tips, tools and news. This is the place to go, for instance, if you want to learn how to submit click investigation requests.

Yahoo! is definitely not as busy this week so far compared to last week, however, there are some notable moving and shaking going on. Let’s start with the big news for Yahoo and make our way down.

News from and about Yahoo!:

• Yahoo in 15-Nation Deal for Search on Cellphones (New York Times)
• Under the deal, Yahoo will feature its search engine on mobile portals run by Telefónica of Spain in 15 countries in Europe and Latin America.
• You know, for the kids (Yodel Anecdotal)
• “Starting Monday, more than 100 bloggers will challenge their readers to fund classroom projects this month. The likes of Engadget, TechCrunch, AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, and Anil Dash are rumored to be participating. And Yahoo! is joining Google, SixApart, and Federated Media by upping the ante with awards. The blogger who motivates the most readers to participate in the Blogger Challenge will get lunch with Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang. And we won’t even make them shave their head. Unless, of course, they want to.”
• Product Pulse – September 28, 2007 (Yodel Anecdotal)
• “Carpal thumbs?: Well, give them a rest by downloading the latest Yahoo! Messenger for the Web. Not only can you access Yahoo! Messenger now from any Internet browser, you can send text messages (SMS) to your pals on their mobile phones (just US, India and Canada for now) for free.”
• “Geeks get rewarded: Got all the (best) answers to questions about consumer electronics, computers and the Internet? Yahoo! Answers may have an iPhone for you as part of their Best Answer Sweeps. Give it your best shot here before October 12th. “
• “Doh! Another 4-year-old: Happy belated to Upcoming. At least we can rely on you to keep good time! Cheers to another event-filled calendar year. “
• Advertise On Whole Network Of Sites With YSM (Web Pro News)
• “Yahoo! Search Marketing includes a new range of sites. This news came into the limelight through a blog posted by Yahoo! Now Yahoo! Search Marketing’s advertising will not be restricted to just Yahoo! Search and other Yahoo! Sites… This is really cool as Yahoo.com is one of the world’s most visited website. The ads also appears on other sites in Yhaoo’s ad network, like MTV.com, iVillage.com and eBay.com, as well as on other popular content and information sites.”

New Yahoo! Applications:

• Air Mail – “Air Mail is a desktop mail application that can access your Yahoo! Mail account. It requires downloading and installing the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR).

Is it odd that Yahoo!’s blogs are run on Google Owned Feedburner?

Either way, here’s what Yahoo has to say recently:

• Finding focus in Hollywood (Yodel Anecdotal – Yahoo’s blog)
• New Tutorial on SMS/Text Messaging (Yahoo! Mail Blog)
• Weather Report: Yahoo! Search update (Yaho! Search Blog)

Here’s what other people have to say about Yahoo!:

• Yahoo Closing Podcasts : Future for Blogs & Podcasts at Yahoo? (Search Engine Journal)
• Yahoo to Update Search Index (Mashable)

Some new Yahoo! Gallery Apps:

• Freecell – Javascript Clone of Window Freecell
• WorldGeoMap – A mashup of Yahoo! Maps with the geocoding service from GeoNames, and the 20,000+ US city database from TetonPost. Three levels of information available: State (Country), City, and Street.
• Web 2.0 Filter – All the latest web 2.0 news from the coolest web 2.0 news pages.
• Flickr Postcard – Send postcards of Flickr images using your Yahoo! Mail account.

The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) is a pretty innovative utility in the Open Source developer field. YUI is almost completely hosted and interacted through the files on your computer. The YUI project is hosted on SourceForge (Really Yahoo!? Why not on Google Code?). Anyways, My favorite feature is the Logging right in the window and the built-in Yahoo UI Library search interface (see below). There are also more than 180 functional examples right now.

However, let’s get a description directly from Yahoo! themselves:

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

The CSS Grid Builder Description from Download Squad:

Enter the CSS Grid Builder from the good folks at Yahoo!. Yahoo! has spent thousands of hours crafting web pages and testing them across all the possible OS and browser combinations (yes, even Opera). The end result of all this testing was the public release of the Yahoo! User Interface CSS and JavaScript libraries. The CSS Grid Builder is a simple web-based interface for quickly creating any number of layouts that rely solely on YUI’s CSS files. This gives you the advantage of easily and visually laying out designs without using tables, and they will work the same way in every popular browser

Built-in Module Search Interface:

Hmmmm, I’ll go easy on MyBlogLog since they were so nice about it in their blog post. Plus I love Yahoo! and MyBlogLog. So good luck guys in fixing it…

We found a bizarre error when we pushed the Yahoo! IDs live today.  We decided, rather than put all of you through a painful login twilight zone, that it would be better for our members if we restricted access to the site until we figure this one out. 

So, while we tear our hair out fixing this one, relax away from your computer for a little while.  We’ll be back ASAP!

Insecticide Needed: We’ve Found A Bug (via MyBlogLog Blog)

Yahoo finally updates us on when our new (non-beta) mail is coming… Previously stated after their big Yahoo! is not in beta party Yahoo! Mail Beta Rollout Might take 6 Weeks for Some. Well, I’m on 3 weeks now already. I mean, COME ON!

Judging from the weekend comments, and because my last post answered one of the other pressing topics, the big question on many of your minds is “When will my account be switched out of beta?”. Unfortunately the official answer is, I really can’t say because exactly when the roll-out reaches you depends on the “farm” (short for server farm) where your account “lives.”

So to elaborate on this mysterious process, I managed to track down Skotch Vail, Director of Yahoo! Mail’s Front End (translation: the engineering folks working the rollout), and while I can’t tell you all individually when your accounts will go live, I can now offer a little more background on the process involved.

So without further ado, here’s the scoop. As has been mentioned before, there are A LOT of accounts to transition: 255 million (according to comScore). All of these user accounts are divided up into hundreds of farms. In advance of every release, we go through extensive internal QA, followed up by selective roll-outs to large numbers of employees (extended QA), but since we cannot replicate every possible scenario of user behavior, browser selection, computer hardware, operating system, and feature usage, we gradually roll the product out to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible.

As we roll the updated code out to each farm, our engineers are closely monitoring for unforeseen issues. It’s also a fairly complex process because of the different types of Mail accounts on our system.

Of course you will now ask why we announce before everyone has it. We know that once it goes out to anyone, word travels fast, so we’d better make sure we explain ourselves. We realize it’s not a totally perfect process, but we really feel like this is the best way to handle something of this magnitude.

Hopefully that helps explain things a little, and thanks much to Skotch for taking the time to chat.

Ryan
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail

When Will YOU Have the All-New Mail (via Yahoo Mail Blog)

• Yahoo! Listened – New My Yahoo! Layouts
• Yahoo! Mail Beta Rollout Might take 6 Weeks for Some
• MyBlogLog Updates IDs and More with Yahoo!
• Sitemaps Will Submit Sites to Yahoo Site Explorer
• Yahoo! Opens Wide (APIs Ahoy)
• Yahoo Buys Zimbra – Shared Email and Group Calendaring

However, there are more to add to that, but instead of separate posts, you can see some of the moves and news Yahoo! has been making:

Yahoo! Blog Postings:

• Finishing Your Emails with a Flourish (Yahoo! Mail Blog)
• Settings give you more control (MyYahoo Blog)

Related News and Posts:

• Email: Yahoo Mail Innovates, Gmail Stagnates (via LifeHacker)
• Yahoo Widget Badges for Your MySpace Page (via Mashable)

Recent Yahoo! Application Gallery Additions:

• GoingAnyway – GoingAnyway is a new way to get things done. Find people who are going where you want to go anyway and pay them for a service. If you’re going somewhere, help out a member of your community and get paid for your efforts.

Yahoo! Mash has been the talk of the tech blogging town recently, there are plenty of articles on the pros and cons, but find out for yourself, leave a comment (I’ll use the private e-mail you use to comment) and I’ll setup a page for you and inform you. That’s how the invites are working these days.

Check out my profile at: http://mash.yahoo.com/adamahirsch

Good for Yahoo! This should hopefully be one of many steps that Yahoo! is taking to improve their Yahoo! Mail services, since I still haven’t been upgraded to their non-Beta version yet.

If you’re a student at Georgia Tech or an employee at Digg or Mozilla.org, you know just how excellent your email and group calendaring experience is. That’s because it’s powered by Zimbra, creator of an innovative Ajax-based mail client that integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, search and VoIP into an incredibly cool browser-based interface. So cool that we’ve just entered an agreement to acquire Zimbra for $350 million.

Zimbra offers incredible technology. We see great opportunities to incorporate some of their best-of-breed features (I really like their calendaring) into Yahoo!’s industry-leading communications products.

Read the Press Release at: Zimbra is so damn cool 

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Purchases, Zimbra, Mail, Email, Calendar, Group, Sharing