As the head of Yahoo! Green, I see all sorts of odd stories related to helping the planet – world naked bike rides, homes made of recycled shipping containers, and even a Buddhist temple made of beer bottles. But they’re also great anecdotes that can help us feel optimistic about where this world is heading, especially amid the dreary economic news.

With all this recession obsession, we wondered whether people would focus on the other kind of green this Earth Day (which is tomorrow). That’s why we decided to take on the common misconception that being green costs more.

Our Earth Day site this year focuses on how you can save money by being green at home. We’ve created an interactive house tour with tips for each room. Some of my favorites include:

• Adjust the brightness of your TV to the “home” energy setting, and your favorite shows will use 30% less energy;
• Borrow designer handbags and jewelry from Bag Borrow or Steal, instead of buying new;
• Try cleaning products that are safe enough you can eat them.

We also have buying guides so you can choose the best cleaning products, water filters, and energy efficiency products for an affordable price. We know everyone is at a different point on their path toward green, so we have easy tips, more intermediate ideas, or even tips for the greenest among you. We also dissect those classic “what’s greener?” choices – you might be surprised that it doesn’t matter whether you use paper or plastic (though reusable is always best) or cloth or disposable diapers.

Every year our employees get caught up in the Earth Day celebration, too. In the past, we’ve watched our founders sumo wrestle after we reduced our resource use, and we hosted a reuse fair where people could swap stuff they no longer wanted. This year we’re playing “Tag, you’re green” in five offices across the country. If employees are spotted taking green actions (reusable mug, vegetarian meal, riding the train, taking the stairs), they’ll receive small prizes.

And finally a shout out to you for making Yahoo! Green the #1 green site (Comscore, March 2009) – you know that Earth Day is every day. I’m off to go unplug some energy vampires… and keep more green in my wallet. What’s your plan?

Erin Carlson
Director, Yahoo! For Good

Photo from noticelj

In the two months we’ve been on Twitter, no tweet has gotten more replay than the one about the yodel that’s hidden in our homepage (just click the exclamation point in our logo and see for yourself). Clearly the sound of the Yahoo! yodel still makes people really happy. Which got me thinking about Wylie Gustafson, the guy who started it all back in 1996.

Wylie’s not some commercial voiceover talent. He’s the real deal — a true singing cowboy. He’s got the belt buckle, hat, ranch, and 20 horses to prove it. I caught up with Wylie to find out how on Earth he got his start in yodeling, how Yahoo! found him for our first ad campaign, how life has changed since then, what he’s doing now, and what it’s like to be the world’s most recognized yodeler. You can read a full transcript of the interview here. But for you multitasking, RSS feed-scanning, I-only-have-time-for-300-words-or-less types, here are some highlights:

• Wylie yodeled for brands like Mitsubishi, Taco Bell, Porsche, and Miller Light before creating his 3-note hit for Yahoo! in 1996.
• When our ad agency brought him into the recording studio, he came up with 10 different yodels of the name Yahoo! in a matter five minutes.
• Wylie yodels for a living with his “Wylie & the Wild West” band.
• Wylie’s yodeling notoriety has landed him gigs with A Prairie Home Companion, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. He has appeared on the Grand Ol Opry more than 50 times.
• Wylie trains cutting (or cattle) horses on a ranch near Dusty, Washington (population: 11).
• His dad was a Montana cowboy and ranch veterinarian and yodeled on horseback.
• Wylie learned to yodel from a reel-to-reel tape his aunt received from an Austrian ski team.
• Wylie and Yahoo! settled a lawsuit in 2002 after we inadvertently used his yodel in a national ad without the proper contract.
• Wylie toured the country as the emcee for the national Yahoo! Yodel Challenge in 2003. The winner, via write-in submission, was Taylor Ware, a 9-year-old who went on to becoming a finalist on “America’s Got Talent.”

And, yes, we’ve sent him his very own Insta-Yodel button. No home is complete without it.

Here’s Wylie in action, singing his most popular live song, about some guy who made it big by yodeling for a little Internet company in the mid-90s. And you can learn how to yodel like Wylie here.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Photo by Bill Watts

Today we honor cheese — and not just because a certain CEO is from Wisconsin. It’s National Cheeseball Day. A day to craft your favorite dairy product into an orb, roll it in some kind of nutty ingredient, grab the crackers, and hail the beauty that is the cheeseball. (Suggested recipe from Amy Sedaris). Here’s what we put on a platter this week:

• Kittens vs. sunsets: This is the perfect Friday night distraction — Flickr Trends. A Flickr engineer mashed up the Flickr API with a trend chart, allowing you to compare the popularity (or in this case, the frequency of being a photo subject) of two terms. So go see which reigns supreme — blondes or brunettes, town or country, beer or fruit juice, mayo or ketchup, good or evil, boxers or briefs. Take it for a spin.
• Faretheewell Jumpcut: As we took stock of our myriad products, we determined it no longer made sense to maintain Jumpcut, the site that let you upload, edit, and share videos. So as of June 15th, we’ll shut its doors. We’ll soon offer a tool that lets you download your videos, which you might want to move over to Flickr or Yahoo! Video. We’re really sorry to see it go, but change we must.
• Get your vote on: This marginally qualifies for the Product Pulse, but it’s been a quiet week due to our pre-earnings quiet period! The nominees are in — the 2009 People’s Voice voting is now open for the Webby Awards and we’re honored to have omg, Flickr, Upcoming, and Yahoo! Go 3.0 in the running. Vote now!

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

If you’re a foodie and/or you use Yahoo! Search, you might want to grab your TV (or DVR) remote tonight. The Food Network’s “Dinner: Impossible” episode featuring Yahoo! Search premieres this evening at 10:00pm ET/PT.

In “The Yahoo! Search Scramble,” you’ll watch Chef Robert Irvine descend upon our headquarters to receive his mission: make the top 15 dishes most searched for on Yahoo!. After all, he was helping us celebrate the fifth anniversary of Yahoo! Search. But there was a little catch — each dish was randomly paired with a top-searched ingredient!

Was Chef Robert able to pull off an edible meal out of some pretty strange pairings and successfully feed 450 Yahoos in just eight hours (with a little help from some Yahoo! friends) — or will this be Dinner: Impossible?

(Here’s our post and photos after the shoot in January)

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

We’ve all been there. At one point of another, we’ve all signed up for an online site or service and, down the road, completely forgotten what information we gave during the registration process. We’ve heard from many of you that making the account recovery process easier at Yahoo! would make you very happy, so we’re modifying the process and adding some new features. Here’s the low-down on the new process and what you can expect.

Starting this week, we’ll be asking you to update your recovery data. Since the information we collected in the past – such as zip codes or birthdays – has increasingly become part of our public persona online, users will be given the option to provide additional information such as an alternate email address and new secret questions of their choice. U.S. users will also have the option to provide a mobile phone number. This updated information will let us help you faster in the event of a future recovery attempt – whether you’ve forgotten your password or your account has been compromised. It also lets us better protect you by creating a recovery process that includes information and questions that only you should be able to complete, with information only you should know.

Our goal is to have all Yahoo! users update this information. We’ll start prompting some users to update their data this week (note: you’ll only see this after you’ve logged in) and will continue reaching out to more and more users over the next several months. If you want to update your information proactively, visit https://edit.yahoo.com/commchannel/manage.

We hope everyone takes advantage of these new features and that, in the event you do forget your Yahoo! details, you find the recovery process as quick and painless as possible.

UPDATE: We’ve gotten some questions about how exactly you’ll be notified to update your account recovery information. You will NOT receive an email from us, but rather be prompted with a screen after you log in to your account. That said, you will receive an email from us to your Yahoo! and your alternate email address every time you update your data (ie, a new secret question). Please be mindful of any phishing attempts — emails that appear to be from Yahoo! but are not. You can read more about phishing and account security at our Yahoo! Security Center.

Sabari Devadoss
Platforms Product Manager, Yahoo! Membership

Photo from fragglerawker_03

Nine years ago today, the NASDAQ composite peaked at 5132.52, marking the beginning of the end of the dot.com boom. In the year that followed, we bade farewell to the Pets.com sock puppet, those wonderful Webvan groceries, buying a pack of gum via Kozmo.com, or getting fashion advice from the Boo.com avatar. Here’s what persevered this week:

• Musical revival: Blowing its doors off their hinges, Yahoo! Music has fully embraced the open web with launch of its new Artist Pages. You’ll find downloads from iTunes; albums from Amazon; streams from Pandora, Last.fm and Rhapsody; music videos from YouTube and Yahoo!; photos from Flickr; and tickets from Ticketmaster – for more than 500,000 artists. And you call the shots on whatever modules you want to see. Eventually artists will be able to publish directly into their pages and developers will beef up our modules gallery. Music to our ears. More here.
• Instant iGratification: No need to get all twitchy when you leave your desk — Yahoo! Messenger is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Released into the wild this week, the free Yahoo! Messenger app can now be found in the iTunes App Store. It’s got a lot of the same bells and whistles — photo sharing, stealth mode, status messages, archiving, emoticons. More here. What?! You don’t have an iPhone? Lucky for you Yahoo! Messenger works with other phones, too — check the roster here.

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

Whether or not you celebrate Easter, who doesn’t love a great Easter egg — that hidden gem of code that makes you squeal like a 5-year-old when you find it? In honor of the Easter Beagle and Marshmallow Peeps everywhere, today we’re going to make your egg hunt ridiculously easy.

Here’s a roster of the hidden treasures you’ll find tucked into corners across Yahoo!:

• Yahoo! Logo Yodel: Click on the exclamation point in our homepage logo to get your yodel fix anytime you need it.
• Yahoo! Mail Subject-o-matique: Stumped for a catchy, evocative email subject line? Just click the “subject” line button when composing or replying to a message, and Yahoo! Mail will cure your writer’s block with a slew of unforgettable one liners (e.g., “My train of thought has derailed,” “Impressive rutabaga!,” and “You! Off my planet!”).
• Yahoo! Messenger Hidden Emoticons: In addition to our dozens of government-issue emoticons, an army of hidden smileys awaits. You’ll find assorted animals, holiday festives, and favorites like “chatterbox,” “not worthy,” “oh go on,” and “I don’t know.”
• Yahoo! Messenger IMVironment: Choose an interactive background, or IM environment, for your Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 IM window and use the BUZZ feature to trigger a surprise.
• Flickr Image Spewing Panda: What could make anyone happier than a rainbow-barfing panda who delivers a continuous stream of interesting Flickr images?
• Flickr Holiday Snow: Wrong season, but if you ever want to make it snow fall on your Flickr photo page, just add ?snow=1 to the end of any photo URL. Like this.
• Flickr Astrometry: Want to find out what planets, galaxies, or nebulae are resident in the starry-night photo you just took? Upload it here. And know that you’re contributing to the open-source sky survey at the same time.
• Yahoo! Maps Sea Monsters: Did you know a quartet of ornery sea creatures lives just west of the Golden Gate Bridge? It’s true. Just go to Yahoo! Maps.
• Yahoo!’s Anti-Values: Not sure if this one really qualifies, since it falls in the shameless-self-promotion category. But while our company values probably aren’t among your favorite bookmarks, don’t miss our covert “What Sucks” list.

Know of other great Easter eggs, on Yahoo! or elsewhere on the Web? Share!

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

You might notice some really familiar names on Yahoo! Music starting today. No, not classic musicians. Names like YouTube, Pandora, Last.fm, Rhapsody, Amazon, Ticketmaster, and iTunes. That’s because we’re turning Yahoo! inside out and opening it up to what we think are the best music services online.

We’ve been evolving our approach to music for the last year or so. We found that our subscription music offering required a huge amount of resources for a relatively small user base, leading to our partnership with Rhapsody. And new royalty rates made us to rethink our streaming radio service, which is now run by CBS. Through all of these tough decisions as the industry evolved, the biggest constant has been our core music offering, which connects music fans to their favorite musicians. We said, “Why compete with everyone, fighting on all fronts, if we can just move up a layer and be a resource to our users?”

So now we can be all things to all music people with a little help from our industry friends. The new Yahoo! Music Artist Pages now bring together downloads from iTunes, albums from Amazon; streams from Pandora, Last.fm and Rhapsody; music videos from YouTube; and tickets from Ticketmaster – for more than 500,000 artists. We also include photos from Flickr as well as our own Yahoo! music videos. You can customize your Artist Pages to include your favorite content modules. Previously a closed service with proprietary licensed content, this is the first major effort by any online music site to truly open itself up to third-party services.

And we’ll soon open up our site to developers so that any music service can build an application to host in our gallery. And eventually artists will be able to directly publish content to our site – so fans can keep tabs on their latest blog posts, photos, music videos, live recordings, etc.

The ultimate goal is help you discover, experience, and consume your favorite music online as easily as possible. So go out there and enjoy the music.

Michael Spiegelman
Head of Yahoo! Music

Twenty-three years ago today, IBM released its first personal portable information manipulator — otherwise known as a laptop. With its clamshell design, the IBM PC Convertible weighed about 13 pounds (akin to a midsized watermelon), utilized two 720K floppy disk drives (no internal hard disk), and measured smaller than a suitcase (progress!). Here’s what we evolved this week:

• Mobile home: As announced in February, we’ve collected all of our mobile offerings into one handy application called, succinctly, Yahoo! Mobile. And this week, it said “sayonara, beta!” You can now access Yahoo! Mobile for the Web on 300+ devices with HTML-enabled mobile browsers (http://new.m.yahoo.com/) or download the free Yahoo! Mobile app from the Apple iPhone App Store. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s open, so you not only get quick access to your favorite Yahoo! services (Mail, Messenger, News, Finance, etc.), you can check your Gmail, see Twitter and Facebook updates, read up on RSS feeds, and more. And, as an added bonus, iPhone users can also download Yahoo! Messenger. More here.
• Get a new image: Searching for an image? You might have noticed our spiffy new Yahoo! Image Search preview page, which is both prettier and more helpful. Click on that thumbnail of Vin Diesel and you get rewarded with a much larger image, along with thumbnails for other top image results and suggestions for related searches (ie, Dwayne Johnson, Brad Pitt, Paul Walker, etc.). More here.
• See attached: Yahoo! Groups is bringing back an old concept — the email attachment! Removed in 2003, we’re reviving this capability so Group members can share images and files and be able to retrieve them at a later date. That’s especially great news if you’re receiving digests. This new tool is currently in beta and will be rolling out to all groups over the next few weeks. Let the kitten photosharing begin! More here, including how-tos for moderators.
• On the Twitter sideline: Are you a Twitterholic looking for an easier way to monitor what’s being said about you or your brand? One of our engineers, playing around with Adobe AIR and the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), has created a nifty little desktop application called Sideline that lets you set up and save multiple tabbed search topics for Twitter conversations. Not bad for a side project. Take it for a spin here.

And, of course, don’t miss our new Ideological Search! ;-)

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

Tired of being inundated with the contradictory and offensive beliefs of others? Today, the scientists at Yahoo! are releasing a groundbreaking new search filter that keeps controversy out of your search experience. I’m extremely pleased to announce the immediate availability of Ideological Search, which allows you to control the ideology of your search results.

Our research found that web searchers are regularly affronted by articles, blogs, facts, and pages that contain perspectives directly contradicting their own personal beliefs and values –- whether political, religious, economic, scientific, philosophical, etc. If consumers have the freedom in whether they navigate to the HuffingtonPost.com or FOXNews.com, why not extend that same choice to search? Until today, no other search engine could provide this level of personalization –- ensuring that consumers can search with the utmost confidence, knowing that they won’t be antagonized by their results.

Ideological Search, built on Yahoo! BOSS, is the result of extensive research conducted by virtually every scientist at Yahoo!. The team applied the latest research from the fields of sentiment analysis, intent detection, eye tracking, clustering and empathic reasoning to create this revolutionary service. We also found that adaptations were required within existing technologies to ensure ideologically-biased results. For example, Pig, the large-scale data processing environment, was not compatible with all beliefs, particularly among vegetarians. As a result we developed a sister codebase called Tofu, which proved to be more flexible and gelatinous, albeit less optimized.

To give Ideological Search a test drive, type in “global warming” or “stimulus package” and see for yourself. For more background on how we developed Ideological Search, visit the Yahoo! Labs site.

We hope this is the start of a more peaceful, conflict-free Yahoo! Search experience for you.

Try Ideological Search today!

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs

Editor’s Note: Earlier this month, 10 underserved high school girls from Los Angeles attended a VIP screening of the documentary “A Powerful Noise” as part of our Purple Acts of Kindness program, which aims to surprise and delight our local communities with random acts of generosity. These freshly empowered girls then had the chance to become filmmakers themselves. Here’s a recap through the eyes of one of the mentors who accompanied them:

Limousines arrived at Gertz-Ressler High School to pick up 10 teens. They were heading out for an evening of film and female empowerment, along with mentors from the Step Up Women’s Network. The girls couldn’t have been more excited and were certainly the envy of their peers! The girls thought the limousine would be the biggest surprise of the night – little did they know what was to come.

After a scrumptious dinner, we presented the girls with a Yahoo! backpack, and they couldn’t believe what was inside. Licetz, the girl I was paired with for the evening, was dancing in her seat when she saw the Flip video camera that was hers to keep and would empower her to make her own powerful voice be heard.

The evening culminated with a VIP screening of “A Powerful Noise,” a documentary presented by CARE about women changing the world. The girls were completely inspired by the strong role models in the film and felt they could also make a difference in their communities. There was a special buzz in the air the entire evening, as the Step Up girls knew they would also have the chance to make a video, capturing their reaction to “A Powerful Noise.”

The two featured videos below were created by Step Up girls who won an all-expense paid trip from Yahoo! to attend the CARE conference in Washington D.C. in May. This is sure to be a life-changing experience for them.

I’ve found it rewarding to volunteer for Step Up’s program for high school girls. It gives these teens an opportunity to be mentored by many professional women throughout their high school years as they prepare for the next step — college. As the first person in my family to receive a college degree, I know how important it is to these girls and their families that they go to college.

These girls don’t often have the opportunity to feel special and privileged, and I was so impressed with Yahoo! for giving them this wonderful, first-class experience.

Edie Lynn Ortenberg
President and CEO of The Hollis House
Volunteer for Step Up Women’s Network

If you’ve never really liked your name, today’s your day to give it a rest. It’s National Joe Day, when everyone’s can introduce themselves as, well, “Joe.” So throw it out there legitimately when you order that venti triple-caff non-fat soy mocha latte. Here’s what we built for you Joe Schmo’s this week:

• The Interwebs invade your TV: You probably won’t ditch your computer any time soon, but now your TV can do more than just coddle couch potatoes. The new Yahoo! TV Widgets are here, debuting in Samsung’s new LED TV 7000, letting you multitask with a vengeance as you watch the boob tube. Without interrupting your program, you can check out content from Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Weather, and Flickr as well as (coming soon) great third-party brands like Twitter, the New York Times, Netflix, eBay, CBS Sports, Showtime and MySpace. You’ll find these widgets on TVs and devices from Sony, LG Electronics, Intel, and VIZIO starting this summer. Watch a demo here.
• Inquisitor goes global: A few weeks ago, we rolled out the Inquisitor app for the iPhone for people in the U.S. Now the mobile search app is available in ten more countries, autocompleting keywords and making suggestions so you can spend less time fat-fingering your query. And according to the Twitterverse, it appears to be scoring a spot on quite a number of iPhone first pages. (Note that you’ll need to change the country default in the options menu if you don’t want U.S. search results.) More here.

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

Did you know that humans have only used verbal language for the past 50,000 years – a virtual blink of the eye in evolutionary time? This got me wondering how people communicated before language. Since we’ve been thriving on this planet for 160,000 years (or millions more, depending on when you start the “human” clock), how exactly how did we express ourselves? And do we hang on to old non-verbal habits today?

MIT Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland stopped by to discuss this very topic with us yesterday as the latest in a series of Big Thinkers lectures at Yahoo! Research. He also shared insights into the expansive research he’s done in his career on what he calls “honest signals,” the non-verbal clues and patterns that reveal everything from how people interact on the job to who they date and whether or not they’re going to buy a given product or service when the telemarketer calls.

Professor Pentland is leading the exploration of this new realm of social science – designing new ways to collect data about our non-verbal communication patterns and analyzing the ever-growing mountains of data we’re creating when we use new technologies (like the Internet and especially mobile phones). Pentland’s work is aimed at making the ways we communicate without language a first class part of how we see and understand the world, and, together with his colleagues and students, he’s applying these new ideas to everything from predicting which speed-daters are going to get together, to tackling public health issues, to what makes companies and creative teams productive (here’s a hint: face time at the water cooler actually pays off!).

In the video below, I interviewed Prof. Pentland about his work. In a week or so, his full lecture will be available at the Yahoo! Research Big Thinkers site, but in the mean time, we hope you enjoy this preview. And for those iPhone and Blackberry users out there, you may want to download the CitySense app the next chance you get for a hands-on experience with the types of data and research Professor Pentland is working on.

Since 2006, we’ve had 20 “Big Thinkers” from UC Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, and others talk to us about everything from economic theory and marketplace design to online amateur media production and other forms of user generated content. They’re a lot of fun and we hope to share more of these interesting discussions and ideas with you as often as we can.

Elizabeth Churchill
Principal Research Scientist, Yahoo! Research

You’ve been hearing for years that your TV isn’t just your computer’s dumb cousin. That all it needs is the right education to bring it up to par. Yet you’re still waiting. Well, we’re starting to hand out full-ride scholarships for your flatscreen.

This week, Samsung debuted a smart new TV, the 46-inch LED TV 7000 that features the first implementation of the Yahoo! TV Widgets. I know what you’re saying — I’ve tried that TV-Web mashup thing before. This time it’s different. You’ll find a dock at the bottom of your screen that features a number of customizable widgets for content like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Weather, Flickr and other great content coming soon. It won’t interrupt your television programming, so you can call up your stock portfolio while watching a baseball game or check for the latest headlines during a slow part of that PBS documentary. It’s multitasking with a vengeance.

But these widgets aren’t limited to Yahoo! content. Since we’ve opened the API to developers, anyone can build a widget, which you can easily download from the Widget Gallery, not unlike an app store. Soon you will be able to add widgets for Twitter, the New York Times, Netflix, eBay, CBS Sports, Showtime and MySpace (just to name a few) to your dock. Perhaps coolest of all, you can access video content through these widgets — so, for example, Blockbuster onDemand movies can stream right from the web to your TV screen. All this with just your remote.

Samsung is first out the door, but TVs and devices from Sony, LG Electronics, Intel, and VIZIO will follow, featuring the Yahoo! Widget Engine beginning this summer.

Since seeing is believing, check out this video demo from Connected TV VP Patrick Barry. Then read the review in the WSJ’s Mossberg Solution.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Whether you’re celebrating Nowruz, Ostara, Shunbun no hi, or the vernal equinox, today is the first day of spring, people! Rebirth, revival, renewal, the end of a long cold winter, and a time to see if you can actually balance an egg on its point. Here’s what we fêted this week:

• omg! celebrity mamas!: The ever-popular gossip site, omg!, is giving you one more way to obsess about the lives of the rich, famous, and far-too-photographed. This week, realizing that you can’t seem to get enough of Katie/Suri, Gwen/Kingston, Angelina/(pick one) on omg!’s Goddess blog, the team has launched “Spotlight to Nightlight,” a biweekly video program that peers into the lives of celebrity mothers. Each three- to five-minute episode features host Ali Landry (former Miss USA and famed “Doritos Girl”) chatting up a different celebrity mom, discussing parenting tips or the latest mama making headlines. Ever wonder how much a starlet’s nanny makes? Get addicted here.
• IE8 4 Y!: Microsoft’s brand new Internet Explorer 8 browser launched this week. Minutes later, we made a Yahoo!-optimized version available. What’s in it for you? Easy access to Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mail, our toolbar, and our homepage. You’ll get instant visual results for weather, stock quotes, and movie reviews/showtimes when you use the browser’s search box (i.e., a three-day weather forecast shows up right inside a search pulldown menu). And, no matter what site you’re on, you can always access a preview window to check your Yahoo! Mail. More on the Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Mail blogs. Download IE 8 optimized for Yahoo! here. (Not available for Macs. Duh.)
• Find photos with fast filters: Ever searched for just the right photo but gotten lost in a sea of stuff you don’t want? Yahoo! Image Search has just added a few new filters to hasten your mission. You can now narrow your scope by selecting black & white vs. color, restricting results to images that are either from Flickr or not, or even specifying the dimensions of the shot you’re after. And they promise more cool stuff to come. More here.
• Sometimes it’s the little things: The Flickr team rolled out two small tweaks that mean so much. If you’ve often found yourself irked by the “loading…” message you got when trying to narrow down your list of contacts, behold the people picker! It’s now lightning-fast when trying to find someone in your Contact List, share an image, or send Flickr mail. But wait, there’s more. For Flickr Pro members, the Stats page now shows real-time data for the day (no more waiting til midnight) and lets you drill down for daily details on up to 28 of the last days. More here and here.

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

If you tuned to the “Morning Show with Mike and Juliet” at 9:17 Eastern time today, you caught Yahoo! Buzz in 3D.

Okay, so, not quite 3D…but the national television morning show kicked off a short segment that looks at top stories (and some scintillating Yahoo! Search insight) from Yahoo! Buzz. We are extraordinarily well represented with former MTV veejay and uber-smart charmer Ananda Lewis. Every Monday, she will alternate with Fox anchor Dylan Lane in running down the weekend news, features, and celebrity tidbits that received the most attention (and votes on Yahoo! Buzz).

This week we covered which scenes unnerved “Twilight” heartthrob Rob Pattinson in his big-screen stint as Salvador Dali, the awful accident involving NFL wide receiver Dante Stallworth, and how bailed-out insurance AIG has managed to outrage taxpayers once more. You can watch the clip below. It’ll also appear on the Buzz Log and the Mike and Juliet site each week.

Vera H-C Chan
Yahoo! Buzz senior editor

I love it when you run into friends on the street. You don’t have to make plans. You don’t have to get organized. You just get to catch up with each other and chat. And it’s even better when running into someone on the street turns into an excuse for a coffee, or a drink, or a meal.

So what if you could make those kinds of little events happen more often? Wouldn’t it be great if — when you were sitting at home or in your office — you could see your friends in the neighborhood? Maybe you could even see if one of them was interested in finding a snack for lunch!

Yahoo! has a way for you to do just that. We’ve made an application called Friends on Fire that brings together Facebook and our Fire Eagle project to help you quickly and easily share your location with your trusted friends. And you can post little messages on the map, too, to recommend bars or restaurants, or to suggest meeting up for a beer!

We like to describe Fire Eagle as a place to store information about your location. You can get your location into Fire Eagle by using all kinds of different Fire Eagle updaters — from iPhones to websites. And then — if you want — you can choose to share your location with all kinds of applications all over the Internet. There are over 70 different applications in our gallery at the moment, and more appearing every day. We also give you control over how much you choose to share with these different applications. You can choose to share your cross-street or your country, you can hide yourself from everyone, and, of course, you can change your preferences at any time.

In addition to Friends on Fire, we’re also launching a new way to update Fire Eagle — a Firefox extension that adds a button to your toolbar. With one click, your location is instantly shared with your trusted friends on your favorite services.

And finally, for the developers among us, we have three new announcements that you can read about over on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.

In the meantime, we hope to see you guys trying out the Facebook app! And don’t hesitate to let us know what you think about it — we love to get your feedback.

Tom Coates
Head of Fire Eagle

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Fast-paced, colorful, increasingly modern. A youthful and exuberant population roars through the city on motor-scooters and spends much of its waking hours surfing the Web. Internet cafes are everywhere. That’s what our team discovered when we visited Vietnam in 2007. We wanted to see the Internet explosion and the vibrancy of this economy first-hand before meeting with U.S. diplomats and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to discuss the state of affairs in Vietnam around the issues of free expression and privacy.

The Internet – and Yahoo! – has a growing presence in Vietnam. By next year, thirty-five percent of the population is expected to get online – staggering when you consider Vietnam didn’t substantially embrace the Web until 2005. We entered the market a year later with a Vietnamese-language version of our homepage (vn.yahoo.com), followed by Mail, Messenger, Search, and News. We now run one of the country’s leading blogging services. And since few people own computers, we’re working with the Internet café industry through our iCafe program to improve the Internet experience for all involved.

Unfortunately, like other regions where communications are controlled, Vietnam is exploring ways to place restrictions on the Internet. The government recently issued regulations on Internet blogging that aim to limit certain online content, particularly posts considered more political in nature. Not surprisingly, these rules have been roundly criticized as an attempt to stifle internationally recognized speech. As a company committed to user safety and trust, we’ll continue to review these and any new rules to determine what effect, if any at all, they would have on our own policies.

We’ve learned tough lessons as pioneers in the emerging markets, and we’re now applying them to how we build businesses in new markets. In the case of Vietnam, we took deliberate steps when launching services there to protect our users. Our business, policy and legal advisors visited the country to assess the landscape as part of our human rights impact assessment – a process we committed to when we created Yahoo!’s Business & Human Rights Program last year. It helped us tailor our business to be consistent with our corporate human rights commitments. For example, we decided to manage and operate Yahoo!’s Vietnamese language services out of Singapore so the services would be governed by laws with stronger protections than in Vietnam today. We’re also providing further protections for our users and employees through legal structures, internal policies, user terms of service, and tailored approaches on data access and location.

We believe deeply in engagement in markets like Vietnam. It’s good business. It’s also empowering for local citizens, as they communicate, exchange ideas, and learn about the outside world in unprecedented ways. The online community is thriving in Vietnam, and we’re in a leadership position in that important and growing market. We’re proud of the business Yahoo! has built there and while we know we’ll face evolving challenges, we’re also confident in the approach we’re pursuing to protect the online rights of our users.

Doing business globally is challenging in any industry. Given the speed, scale, and dynamism of the Internet, our industry has some unique challenges. Some of those same issues in the emerging markets are also opportunities to spread enormously empowering information and communications tools and platforms to citizens hungry for access and openness. We’re a company founded on the principles of openness and user trust, and we’re not alone in our commitment to protecting and promoting these rights. We’re confident our partnership with companies, human rights groups, academics, and investors in the Global Network Initiative offers a powerful platform for collective action to promote freedom of expression and privacy online around the world, including in promising places like Vietnam.

You can read more about our global human rights initiatives here.

Michael Samway
VP & Deputy General Counsel

Photo from janello

Last July, we announced an exclusive partnership between Flickr and Getty Images to form The Flickr Collection on gettyimages.com and offer a new kind of creative imagery collection for licensing. Today, we’re ready to debut the collection to the world.

First and foremost, we want to say congratulations to our members — this is truly a testament to their great work. Our community of more than 35 million members from all over the globe continue to amaze us with the authentic and individualistic images that they see in their daily lives and share on Flickr.

For the past few months, editors at Getty Images have been busy exploring the Flickrverse to find the right photos to be part of the collection – a task that is somewhat daunting when there are more than three billion images to choose from on Flickr. The goal was to choose photos that created a commercially viable collection, while preserving the inspirational and unexpected nature of the kinds of images that are so prevalent on Flickr. Like Flickr itself, this is a “living collection” and Getty Images will continue to add thousands of new images every month from here on out.

We see this as an exciting moment that’s breaking new ground for our members around the world, as well as the larger imagery industry. So what are you waiting for — start exploring the first set of photos on gettyimages.com/flickr.

Kakul Srivastava
Flickr General Manager

Photos courtesy of Flickr Collection/Getty Images

It’s National Frozen Foods Day! A time to honor the cryogenic wizardry that prolongs the life and freshness of pizzas, peas, breakfast sausage, Hungry Man dinners, ice cream, and, of course, snowballs. Honorable mention goes to the microwave today. Here’s what we nuked up this week:

• Video free for all: Flickr made several video headlines on Monday. First, they granted free video uploads to all users (hooray!). Then they introduced HD video uploads for Pro users (yahooo!), bringing the magical and glorious world of crisp, aperture-rich high-definition video to the viewing masses on Flickr. And, finally, they introduced Flickr Clock, a unique new toy that lets you explore videos taken across the Flickrverse by time of day. Oh! And unrelated to video, free Flickr users are no longer relegated to organizing photos into just three sets — let’s hear it for unlimited sets for your 200 most recent photos.
• In the loop on Mail: If you noticed something different when you logged into Yahoo! Mail, that’s because the team has been sprucing up the page with more new social features. As we said in December, we’re working on bringing you a “smarter inbox.” Initially, you could see your friends’ Yahoo!-related updates (i.e., stories they’ve buzzed on Yahoo! Buzz, hotels rated on Yahoo! Travel, etc.). But now you can see their updates from across the web — sites like YouTube, Blogger, Yelp, Picasa, and more. And there are many more Yahoo! sites now live, including Yahoo! Sports and Flickr. More here.
• Inquisitive iPhone: If you own an iPhone in the U.S., I suggest you run — don’t walk — to the App Store and download yourself a copy of the new Inquisitor app. This new mobile version of Inquisitor makes searching on your iPhone a breeze by autocompleting keywords and making search suggestions, so you can spend less time typing and more time finding. Here’s the buzz on Twitter. Obama’s not your president? Sit tight — it’s coming to your world soon.
• That’s my Mac calling: If you’re a Mac head and like calling your friends via Yahoo! Messenger, listen up. One of our engineers has written a plugin that lets you automatically dial a friend from within your Mac Address Book. Just install the script, open a friend’s contact card, right-click on the phone number, select “Call with Yahoo! Messenger,” and start gabbing away. Make sure you have Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 Beta 4. More here.

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