This day in history marks groundbreaking milestones that cemented America’s stature as a consumerist force to be reckoned with. Charles Hires invented root beer 142 years ago (how now, brown cow) and SpaghettiO’s (Uh-oh!) made their debut 99 years later. What’s more, it’s National Sea Monkey Day — so give a treat and a hug to those peculiar just-add-water creatures. After you give it up for marvels we can’t live without, read up on what we invented this week:

• Traffic is a good thing: That’s right, there are more traffic pileups than ever on Yahoo! Maps to help make you the wiliest driver on the road. They’ve added a panoply of new markets from Bakersfield, Calif., to Rochester, Maine, and improved markets like New York, which previously only gave you incident data. And why should freeways have all the fun, when you can find out about traffic jams on major thoroughfares. No more getting stuck on Manhattan’s Canal Street or San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue. Add in our drag-and-drop routing and your clutch will be buying you pizza. More here.
• Exploring bookmarks: Swiftly on the heels of the popular del.icio.us Firefox 3 beta extension comes an early beta release of an Internet Explorer version. Now IE users can revel in plugin features like nearly instantaneous searching with huge accounts (yeah, you, with more than 10,000 bookmarks), full sidebar and toolbar integration with bookmark synch and typedown search, and a handy indicator of new network activity and links. Download it here or discuss it here.
• Mybloglog gets friendlier: Kevin Bacon, eat your heart out. Mybloglog has just launched Friender, a quick way to grow your network of friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends… The next time you go to manage your friends and contacts, you’ll notice a “Friender” tab. It’s essentially a rank-ordered list of friends (and others they know) that you’re connected to elsewhere. Chances are, if someone knows five of your friends, you probably know them, too. You quickly fly through the list and grow your network. And the best part is it all happens in real-time. Shazam! More here.
• Monkey on the loose: It’s official. The doors to Yahoo! Search no longer have locks. SearchMonkey is open for business, inviting developers (from pros to tinkerers) to start building customized Yahoo! Search results that are even more useful and relevant. If structured data makes you quiver (think CitySearch, StumbleUpon, eBay, Epicurious, Yelp, Netflix), you’ll waste no time mashing it up to add links, reviews, contact information, reservations, etc. to your site’s search listing. And if that’s not enough motivation for you, how does winning up to 10,000 clams sound? We’re looking for search heroes in the categories of Best Enhanced Result, Best Infobar, Most Innovative Use of Structured Data, Best Data Service, and Grand Prize (best over all categories). More on the SearchMonkey Challenge here.

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As you no doubt saw earlier today, financier Carl Icahn has announced that he intends to nominate a slate of ten directors to our board of directors at our annual stockholder meeting. Here’s the letter he sent to our chairman, Roy Bostock, and here’s a response we just issued.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

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

You silently grieve every time you open your drawer — all those lonely socks whose mates went missing on their last trip to the laundry room. Well, today is Lost Sock Memorial Day. A time to mourn, eulogize… and then face the music and admit those tootsie warmers ain’t never coming back. After you’re done purging, here’s what we got out of our system this week:

• Safe from harm: Like the real world, the Web can have some crummy neighborhoods. That’s why we launched SearchScan, a new safety feature built into Yahoo! Search, courtesy of the security experts at McAfee. No more unwittingly clicking on dangerous links that might download spyware, malware, or other nefarious wares. You’ll get a warning label next to questionable web sites, including those that might have dubious email practices that include spammy missives in your inbox. We just don’t want you going to the wrong side of the street. More here.
• Your every move: Those cats at MyBlogLog are making it easier to keep tabs on what your community of contacts is up to. They’ve just added Yahoo! Answers, Google Reader, and the cool new video startup Seesmic to the nearly 50 popular services you can track in your “New With Me” lifestream. Make a move? MyBlogLog will post that event for all to see. More here. They also just cooked up an Add Services Shortcut (with a most unfortunate acronym) that assumes that you use the same screenname at multiple sites. Their script monkeys scan the services for your ID and let you add them with a single click.
• Seeing is believing: You’re a visual person. You like pretty pictures. Then Glue Pages Beta is for you. Over across the Big Pond, the Yahoo! India Search team just launched a new concept for search that sticks text, images, and video content together into a single results page. Available for select terms across categories like health, sports, entertainment, travel, technology, and finance, it gives you various takes on a given topic. For example, “Barak Obama” brings back results on Wikipedia, Yahoo! News, Memeorandum.com, videos, images, blogs, and RSS feeds for the most active political news sources. More here.
• Searchin’ Safari: This isn’t so much product news, as just good news… for Mac users. We just acquired Inquisitor, which created a Safari browser plug-in that auto-completes search queries and pops up results along with ideas to help refine. It’s not unlike our own Search Assist feature. Download it here and keep your eyes peeled for future innovations.

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We’re acutely aware Yahoo!’s products, technology, and operating footprint increasingly have potential to intersect human rights issues — in particular freedom of expression and privacy — around the world.

Today we’re announcing the launch of our Business & Human Rights Program, and through it we hope to help define ourselves as an industry leader in this important field. It’s no secret that certain governments around the world don’t live up to widely recognized standards for protecting the free expression and privacy rights of their own citizens. While the root causes of these threats clearly lie with governments, we also know corporations have important obligations in the field of human rights.

The Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program represents another step forward in our commitment to human rights, and a number of pillars support this program:

• Executive Commitment. We’ve got it. For those of us who’ve been with Jerry in meetings on Capitol Hill, at the State Department, or with human rights activists, the long-term commitment is clear.
• Dedicated and Cross-Functional Teams. The Program will expand our core team and continue centralized leadership on global strategy, industry initiatives, business decision-making, and internal and external stakeholder engagement.
• Guiding Principles and Operational Guidelines. We’re committed to the international foundations of freedom of expression and privacy, and we’ll continue translating those principles into practical steps to be followed by our employees.
• Human Rights Touch-Point Inventory + Clearinghouse. We’ll constantly review the intersection points of our business with potential human rights issues and ensure risks are routed to the right teams.
• Human Rights Impact Assessments. We’re committed to exploring risks to freedom of expression and privacy in challenging markets, engaging with external stakeholders, and designing risk mitigation strategies.
• Internal and External Stakeholder Engagement. The single most important stakeholders are our users. We also must stay closely connected to our employees and maintain our strong relationships with industry peers, human rights groups, academics, and governments, including our own State Department.
• Accountability Framework. We also believe in designing an effective system to assess our own performance in meeting our overall goals and our operational steps relating to human rights issues.

We’re a company built on open access to information and user trust . We’ve encouraged scholarship on technology and human rights, funding two university fellowships so far. We’ve also teamed up with a noted human rights activist to create the Yahoo! Human Rights Fund. We’re deeply committed to the current collective initiative with industry peers, human rights groups, academics, and socially responsible investors to design standards to guide companies in challenging markets.

We believe companies can move forward today to integrate human rights decision-making into their business operations, and we intend to show our own leadership and commitment to freedom of expression and privacy through the creation of the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program.

Michael Samway
VP & Deputy General Counsel

Did you know that every year Internet scams and traps cost Americans over 7 billion dollars? Searching on the Web can present a minefield of spyware, malware and other malicious sites that can cause serious harm to your PC and cost you valuable time and money.

We are taking steps to make you feel safe when searching the Web — warning you about dangerous sites before you click on them. Today we’ve launched SearchScan (in beta), a new safety feature tucked into Yahoo! Search, courtesy of our friends, the dedicated security experts over at McAfee.

It provides alerts that appear within your search results, flagging “risky” sites with dangerous downloads that can include spyware and viruses. SearchScan will even warn you about sites that have dubious email practices to help you keep your email box free of spam.

No other search engine today offers you this level of warning before visiting sites. Period.

Yahoo! Search with the SearchScan feature is like your Internet security guard, warning you of danger so you can search with confidence… another reason to make Yahoo.com your starting point

Vish Makhijani
SVP & GM, Yahoo! Search

The last 13 weeks have been a remarkable time here at Yahoo!. We’ve been living under the microscope in a way we never have before. There has been greater attention than ever on our strategy and our ability to execute against it. Some even questioned whether Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal would distract us from our mission, just as we were beginning to really push the pedal on our strategy.

Those people underestimated the determination of Yahoo!’s incredible people, spirit and culture.

Our first quarter was probably one of the most exciting quarters in our history in terms of delivering innovative products and services that really move the needle and make a difference for our users and customers: Acquiring Maven Networks. Launching Buzz, OneSearch 2.0, voice-activated mobile search, video on Flickr, Shine. Previewing AMP! from Yahoo! and SearchMonkey. Adding more Newspaper Consortium members. Establishing our New R&D labs in India and Israel. Our first quarter results proved that we have the right strategy, a fantastic team, and that our investments are starting to pay off.

All of this reinforced our board’s position that Microsoft’s offer undervalued our unique global franchise.

So, what’s next? With Microsoft’s withdrawal, we’ll be better able to focus our energy on growing our industry leadership and maximizing value for stockholders. We’ll continue to execute on our plan — making your Internet experience as personal, relevant, open and social as possible, serving advertisers so well they insist on working with us, and opening up Yahoo! in a way that developers dream of. And, we’ll also continue to pursue strategic opportunities that position us for long-term success.

Has this experience changed us? Of course, it has. We’ve emerged a stronger, more focused company with an even greater sense of purpose. I’m so proud of how this company has come together, put the noise aside, and showed the world that we have the resolve and determination to thrive in challenging times.

We know the spotlight will probably stay on us for a while. That’s fine — we have a clear path ahead and momentum to build on. And thousands of dedicated Yahoos around the world who have held up well to scrutiny. It’s now up to us to show what we Yahoos can really do.

By the way, I’m sure you’ve all read or watched the news about this. Frankly, there’s a lot of nonsense and misinformation in what’s being reported. Just so we are all clear, here’s what happened. The board took its mission very seriously. We clearly indicated to Microsoft that we were open to a transaction but only if it were on terms that fully recognized the value of Yahoo! and was in the best interests of our stockholders.

No one is celebrating about the outcome of these past three months… and no one should. We live and work in a competitive world and the Web is only going to get more competitive. Executing on our strategic plan is what matters most.

Finally, I’d like to thank the many of you who so passionately shared your support for Yahoo!. That’s what brings it all home for us.

Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo

In case you haven’t already seen the news, Microsoft today withdrew its proposal to acquire Yahoo!. Here’s our press release, with comments from Yahoo! board chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

I hope you did your laundry, because today is No Pants Day. A tradition started in Austin, Texas (no doubt a part of the “Keep Austin Weird” conspiracy), its goal is simply to “revel in the absence of pants.” (And, no, kilts don’t count.) Before you hit the town in your bloomers, have a look at how we did it one leg at a time this week:

• del.icio.us gets foxy: Firefox users just got a del.icio.us treat — a new Firefox extension that fully supports Firefox 3 (while working just fine with Firefox 2, thank you). Its handy features include keyboard shortcuts for accessing bookmarks (just hit F2) and a new bookmark-saving layout. It’s a beta release, so the team is eager to hear if you have feedback before the official launch. More here.
• YT? Can you hear this?: Got Vista? Check. Got Yahoo! Messenger? Check. Now you can make PC-to-PC calls to your Yahoo! Messenger pals, or even dial landlines and mobile phones. Just for fun, you can even animate your voices as you talk. The all-new voice-enabled beta version of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista also lets you SMS your friends’ mobile phones for free. The team’s been busy adding features you’ve been requesting, and now they’re setting their sights on webcam video, archiving, photo sharing, and more. Hang in there with them. Download the new version here.

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

Leonard Lin put together an excellent list of the presentations at Web 2.0 Expo, complete with links to slides and video when available. All of the presentations are worth checking out, but I wanted to point out the ones on the list from Yahoo (not all slides are available yet -- we will add to the list as they become available):

A Flickr approach to Making Sense of the World, from Rev Dan Catt of Flickr

Capacity Planning for Web Operations, from John Allspaw of Flickr

Grasping Social Patterns, from Christian Crumlish of Yahoo! Developer Network (from Ignite SF)

Tagging: Opportunities and Challenges of Scale, from Kakul Srivastava of Flickr

Also, be sure to check out CTO Ari Balogh's keynote in which he introduces Y!OS (the Yahoo! Open Strategy) and Neal Sample's deep-dive into Y!OS.

You’re busy. You read fast. You have a lot more blogs to go today. But before you move on, wanna take two seconds to give us a little feedback? We’ve just added an insta-ratings system to every post, which will help us get a sense for what you dug and what outright bombed (it’s ok, thick skin). In each post footer, you’ll find five dots. Click, boom, done.

To aid you in your rating decision-making, here are some suggested criteria for selecting from one to five dots:

5 — Epic. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
4 — That rocked. Though it could’ve used a little more je ne sais quoi.
3 — That hit the spot. Thanks.
2 — Meh.
1 — Wow. That sucked. No more of that, please.

Note that you can only rate a post once. So don’t get trigger happy. Thank you kindly.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

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

Anyone who knows me knows that I love sneakers. Ok, you might even say I am sneaker obsessed. From the walk-in closet with 160+ pairs of shoes, to my blog SneakerBlogger, to the custom Nike’s in Yahoo! colors I created for CES earlier this year, I try to find any way I can to incorporate them into my personal and professional life. So when I saw that Yahoo! was going to be hosting a Freecycle-inspired “Free is Good Fair” for employees on campus today (a belated Earth Day swap meet) and that one of the items being donated would be Chief Yahoo David Filo’s signature Adidas sneakers, I started cleaning out my closet.

Much to my wife’s delight, among other things I contributed were five pairs of sneakers and athletic shoes and I was able to actually watch people pick them up and give them a new home. (Yes, people WILL wear other people’s shoes…) Hopefully they will get some great use and their new owners will think hard about what THEY could give up to turn their personal trash into someone else’s treasure.

I’m told Yahoos brought in more than 2,000 items from closets and basements throughout the Bay Area that might otherwise have been destined for landfills. The more interesting things I saw included a vintage map of Silicon Valley businesses from 2000, a red lacy bra (which seemed to disappear quickly), last-generation Tivos, Rockem Sockem Robots, vacuum cleaners, a complete set of Star Trek: Next Generation VHS tapes, bunny slippers, fleeces galore, Yahoo! schwag (Yahoo! Chicago stickers, anyone?), and gently used sporting equipment. Items that had not seen the light of day for years were suddenly adopted by new guardians, who promised to put them into immediate use. Although I think the snow skis might have to wait until next season…

We duplicated this fair in six California, New York, and Oregon offices. And whatever wasn’t claimed was carted away by local charities like the Salvation Army.

So if you see me around campus with size 10.5 Adidas shell-toes, know that they will be well cared for and infused with the spirit of giving.

Hmm… I wonder what size Jerry wears?…

Here are some photos and a video recap:

Lucas Mast
Senior PR Manager
Connected Life

Back in March, I wrote about Seeds for Success, a Yahoo! grant program for women entrepreneurs. Today, I’ve got three finalists for you.

But first, let me explain why this program is so near and dear to me. One word: Mentoring. My own career, including the opportunity to judge on The Apprentice and the upcoming launch of FindingWhatMatters.com (what should be the single largest network of career/life experts and resources anywhere), was built on the advice of wise mentors. They helped steer and cheer me. And now it’s my turn to pay it forward.

The three winners will have access to a host of business experts, including myself; Bobbi Brown, founder and CEO of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics; Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines and author of the bestselling book “Basic Black: The Essential Guide to Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life);” and a dozen others who have walked the entrepreneur’s road. We’ll take them under our wings and show them the proverbial ropes.

Each finalist will also receive a grant package that includes $20,000 in cash, $5,000 in website consulting from three Yahoo! Small Business partners, and website hosting from Yahoo!.

Without further ado, I present the three finalists:

Dana Rubinstein (New York, NY): Dana is co-founder of Dapple, a company which produces baby-safe and earth-friendly detergents, cleaners and sanitizers. She and her business partner created these products based on their own experiences of wanting safer, eco-friendly choices for their children. Dapple is ready to launch its first product in NYC test markets this spring.

Abby Port (Woodstock, GA): Abby is founder and CEO of Red Koala, an online purveyor of customizable canvas-based art for everything from home décor to other canvas products, such as shoes, totes and luggage. A veteran of the corporate world, Abby decided to start her own business after the birth of her third child. Work on Red Koala’s website has already begun and the site should be ready to launch in a couple of months.

Karla Duncan (Birmingham, AL): A pediatric speech pathologist, Karla is founder and president of Head2Toe Publications, a company that designs and develops toys and educational materials specifically for special needs children. Karla founded Head2Toe out of a desire to have the products she truly needs in order to care for the children with whom she works. Head2Toe products currently are in development.

These women, painstakingly (truly the roughest part of this assignment!) selected from among 5,500 entrants with compelling ideas, will spend the next six months using the mentoring, hosting and financial resources they’ve won to grow their businesses. The one who achieves the most growth in that time will win a $10,000 bonus grant.

Want to keep up with their progress? Check in regularly to track the finalists and their businesses, and tap into blog entries from them, as well as from Bobbi, Cathie, and me.

Success. It’s all in knowing where to go with what you’ve got. And finding the right someone to point you there.

Carolyn Kepcher
CEO and Co-Founder
Carolyn & Co. Media
fwm:Finding What Matters

I do. And so does everyone else in our Northern California offices. Her name is Danielle Bricker. And she is singularly responsible for getting people out of their gas-guzzling cars and into far-more-pleasurable, alternative modes of transportation (WiFi shuttle buses, commuter trains, light rail, bikes, van pools, carpools, etc.).

With the title of “Commute Coordinator,” Danielle is likely a maverick in Corporate America. She’s not only a cheerleader for a greener way of life (literally walking the walk), she’s there to help every Yahoo figure out the most practical way from Point A to Point B. And she has a good answer for just about every excuse you can come up with: “What if my kid gets sick in the middle of the day and I have no car?” Our guaranteed ride home program won’t cost you a dime. “But I’ll get sweaty on my bike!” We’ve got showers. “No one else works my hours.” Let me check my database of carpoolers.

Here’s a report NBC just ran about Danielle and our commute program, inspired by photos she took on a recent commute from San Francisco.

With fossil fuel flirting with $4 a gallon, you need to get yourself a Danielle.

Props to Paul Stamatiou, former Yodel intern, for his great how-to on embedding Flickr slideshows.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Would you believe it was only 55 years ago today that we first understood how genes were passed from generation to generation? Can you say double helix? After pausing to honor the granddaddies of molecular biology, check out what was in our deoxyribose nucleic acid this week.

• Would you like to touch our SearchMonkey?: If you’re a developer or site owner clamoring for a chance to monkey with enhanced Yahoo! search results, sign up for a developer preview of SearchMonkey or mark your calendar for our May 15th developer launch party. It’s our first step toward a totally new open Yahoo! strategy. Buh bye, links and abstracts. Hello, rich results with data like images, deep links, ratings, reviews, etc.!
• Circle of refinement: Yahoo! Local just made narrowing search results vastly easier with that rockstar of geometry: the circle. Looking for a greasy spoon for breakfast, but want one close to the ocean? Click “expand map” on your search query results and move that circle around to whatever ‘hood you’re looking for and make the radius bigger or smaller. As you move the circle, the business results automatically update. Brings new meaning to search radius. More here.
• Share your Flickr love: See something on Flickr and just can’t contain yourself? In this world of instant gratification, it’s now easier than ever to share photos, videos, sets, and groups with Flickr’s simple new “share this” button. Everpresent on the upper right side, it beckons you to email, link to, blog about, or get the HTML code to embed pictures and videos. What’s more, it will auto-complete screen names of your contacts as you type. All the more easy to spread the love. More here.
• Ain’t nothin’ better than free: You’re about to toss your old bottle cap collection when you realize there just might be a 10-year-old aching for a Nehi Red to complete his. That’s when you go check out our “Free is Good” microsite, launched in honor of Earth Day. It’s based on the old “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” adage and it’s there to help you find reuse groups in your neck of the woods. In addition to the warm feeling you’ll get inside from getting cool stuff and keeping other stuff out of landfills, you’ll have a shot at scoring eco-friendly prizes like a Smart car, a trek to a national park, a trip to an eco-resort, a home energy audit, local organic food or public transit for a year, or even free toilet paper (hey, who doesn’t need that?). Get thee green!
• Gimme your digits: You’ll never have to ask that again with the new MyBlogLog feature that lets you instantly add your MyBlogLog contacts and other members to your address book. They’ve rolled out one-click access to vCards (for Outlook, Thunderbird, Address Book on Macs, etc.) and hCards (for you more sophisticated microformats fan). Your info will reflect whatever you specified in your privacy settings. There’s nothing quite like portable data. More here.

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

You’re a developer. Your dream is to impact an insane number of people with your work. And you’re impatient — you don’t want to start small, dazzling just a few people with your coding wares.

Enter the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS). Imagine a world where you can write code that will meaningfully reach millions of users in a single bound. That’s the promise of an open Yahoo!.

Ari Balogh, our new CTO, just offered a preview at Web 2.0 Expo of a very new kind of Yahoo!. One that invites developers to take advantage of our huge scale to write applications that build on our existing properties (think Mail, Sports, Search, our front page, mobile, My Yahoo!, etc.), tap into millions of loyal users, and make Internet experience more relevant and useful. You’ve heard us hint at this for a while and now it’s right around the corner.

Think about it: Yahoo! serves more than 500 million unique users every month. We serve 120 billion page views per month. Yahoo! users spend 235 billion minutes a month on our sites. More importantly, some 10 billion relationships exist on user buddy lists and in Yahoo! address books. All that represents a mind-boggling audience for developers.

There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo!, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. We’re making Yahoo! more social, but we’re not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network… we just need to unlock it.

We are rewiring Yahoo!, building platforms that fundamentally change how Yahoo! works. We’re also opening up to developers to take advantage of the social aspects of our many favored destinations, creating what we call “vitality” — a lifeline into what’s happening with your social connections We plan to become open the best platform on the web, where tens of thousands of developers will create applications and features (many we’ve never even thought of) for our network and our consumers.

Of course, lots of Internet companies are on the “open” bandwagon. In fact, the bandwagon is getting pretty crowded (I’ve never actually seen a bandwagon, but go with me on this). Yahoo! has been in the “open” camp for years, starting simple with RSS feeds in 2003. And now Flickr is the second-most popular API on the Web. We’ve also been a leader in industry’s efforts to embrace open development.

A first taste of our strategy is SearchMonkey, which will let developers mash up helpful data with our search engine results. A Japanese restaurant would no longer be a simple link. Instead, it could include a photo, address, ratings, reviews, and links to online reservations. Search Monkey will be available in a few weeks. Make sure you come to our launch party on May 15th.

And it doesn’t stop there. Y!OS will let developers make Yahoo! portable so that everywhere you go, a more relevant, social and useful online experience is available to you. Shopping on a third-party site? Why not have instant access to your Yahoo! Address Book? I know I want it! ;-)

We’ve previewed Yahoo! OS with leading development shops and they’re very excited to do their thing on Yahoo!. In fact, they plan to dedicate a lot of resources to this platform. It all comes back to the size of the opportunity, right?

Today’s just the beginning. There’s plenty more to come in the months ahead!

UPDATE: Here’s a video of Ari’s Web 2.0 Expo keynote from this morning.

Neal Sample
Chief Architect, Platforms

When it comes to the hall of fame of the Web 2.0 world, the CNET Webware 100 Awards is as close as it gets. And here comes the shameless self-promotion… Yahoo! just brought home a fistful of trophies for having the best Web applications represented in 8 out of the 10 categories.

Making it onto this list isn’t easy. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations, the editors selected 300 finalists. Then they took it to the people for the popular vote, selecting the 100 top products in 10 different categories. After nearly two million votes were cast, our friends from Yahoo! Front Page/Search, Flickr, Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Calendar, and Yahoo! Briefcase were all recognized by the community for offering a favorite app. And rest assured, they heart you back.

Check out the whole list of winners here .

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Over the past couple of months, we've been quietly working at Brickhouse and focusing on what matters most: delivering delightful new products. In February and March, the teams at Brickhouse were busy shipping Yahoo! Live (which launched on February 7) and Fire Eagle (launched March 5). Both are thriving in their early days.

Yahoo! Live, our experiment in social broadcasting, has been blowing the doors off, hitting over a million users in its first few weeks. We've featured broadcasters ranging from rock stars (Motley Crue) to well-known DJs (Paul Oakenfold at the Winter Music Conference) to emerging stars like Sheena Melwani. Yahoo! Live can be purely entertaining, but it also touches people's lives in wonderfully unexpected ways. Just as one example, the deaf community quickly discovered Live and created the DeafRead channel, which has become an all-hours gathering spot for signing and chatting (reading this testimonial really warmed my heart). Yahoo! Live has become a truly meaningful "third place" for all types of social interactions. With a full-featured developer API, developers can build their own experiences around the Live platform, too.

Fire Eagle launched as an invite-only developer beta barely six weeks ago and is building momentum as we move towards a general release (request an invite at the Fire Eagle home page). On the day we launched, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb wrote: "Standards based platform plus strong privacy equals the best scenario I can imagine for a location tracking service. We'll see what kinds of innovative applications get built on top of it." Well, the developer community has responded with enthusiasm and new applications are emerging regularly. If you have an invite, you can already leverage Fire Eagle in a growing gallery of applications including Dopplr, Firebot, Dashboard widgets for OS X (dmg file), Loki toolbar for IE/Firefox, a Movable Type plugin, Navizon, Wikinear, and ZoneTag. Aside from the applications listed in our gallery, many other developer partners have integrated with Fire Eagle or will be integrating soon: Plazes, Outside.in (details here), Lightpole, Rummble, plus many more in the pipeline. If you would like to become a Fire Eagle developer, join the developer group.

We're excited about Yahoo! Live and Fire Eagle, and this week's Web 2.0 Expo (taking place just down the street from us at Brickhouse in San Francisco) gives us the perfect opportunity to thank the communities who have helped these projects do so well in their first several weeks, so we're throwing a party in the Brickhouse space as part of the "South Park Crawl." Just RSVP on Upcoming or show us your Web 2.0 Expo pass to get in. The Fire Eagle and Live teams will be on hand and we'll have loads of Fire Eagle invites, a couple of our favorite DJs from Yahoo! Live, and plenty of beer. Be sure to use Fireball "Web 2.0 Expo edition" (a Fire Eagle / Twitter / Upcoming app that just launched last night!) to find out where your friends are during the show.

Thank you for using Fire Eagle and Yahoo! Live, and see you at the party!

EDITOR’S NOTE: The earthwise among you know that tomorrow is Earth Day. We are teaming up with Freecycle™ and other popular reuse groups to inspire people to swap stuff they’d normally send to a landfill. In honor of Yahoo!’s “Free is Good” campaign, into which we’ve tucked treasures like a Smart Car, eco-resort vacation, and Sheryl Crow tickets, we’ve asked a Yahoo! user to reflect on what a boon Freecycle has been to her life:

September 19, 2003 should be memorable as my son Davis’ fifth birthday. Instead, we remember it more clearly as the day we started the very long recovery from Hurricane Isabel, which had hit our small Virginia town the day before. We lost just about everything in the bottom three feet of our garage to floodwater.

Several months later, I read about the local Yorktown Freecycle Yahoo! group and quickly joined. I immediately saw how it could help my town in its recovery efforts (which is, I might add, STILL ongoing five years later as friends and neighbors continue to shell out to repair floors and foundations).

The group proved useful just a few days after I joined. I had posted a want for a lawnmower and within 48 hours, I heard from “uubooklady.” When she let me know that her husband had recently bought a new mower to replace their 1985 Toro and that we were welcome to it, I was elated. I’ve always been happy to use hand-me-downs, and Deron Beal’s brilliant idea to use modern technology to share belongings locally via the Freecycle Network was a perfect match for my earth-friendly leanings.

When my husband Jim went to retrieve his “new” mower, lo and behold, his work colleague Ellis came pushing it out of the garage! These men worked mere feet from one another at NASA, yet they would have never made the lawnmower connection if it hadn’t been for Yahoo! Groups and the Freecycle Network.

I started FreecyclePoquoson for my own town that very week and have been happily moderating it ever since. We’ve grown to almost 600 members and we connect neighbors on a daily basis.

I’ve given away furniture, kitchen items, clothing, toys, and office supplies. I’ve received puzzles, games, craft supplies, used egg cartons (we raise hens and reuse cartons), even empty Kool-Aid Jammers (which I sew into very cool purses). I also get nearly-expired bread each week from a guy I met on Freecycle, who rescues it from grocery stores. I’m now known as “the bread lady” because I put a giant stack (we’re talking over 100 loaves) on my porch for neighbors who might be too proud to get food from the food pantry but are happy to keep it from being tossed into the landfill.

There are literally MILLIONS of similar stories about how helpful the Freecycle Network has been in people’s lives. I’ve seen time again how, while Freecycle often begins with an experience of a person receiving, it inevitably turns into discovering the joy of giving.

Freecycle, through Yahoo!, makes every day Earth Day and provides a modern, free, easy to use format to prove true the old adage, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” It sure beats spending hours having a yard sale or trolling sales!

Davis is nine now. He’s never known anything other than listing his old “stuff” on Freecycle. I don’t know when Poquoson will fully recover, but I do know that Freecycle and Yahoo! have and will continue to play an important part in the healing process… both for our community and for Mother Earth.

Traci-Dale
Yahoo! Groups user
Moderator, FreecyclePoquoson