Posted December 26th, 2008 at 6:10 am by Connie Chan, Yahoo! for Good
1 Comment » / Filed in: Yahoo! For Good
After all the gifts are unwrapped, decorations boxed up, and holiday music wound down, what are we left with? In these tough economic times, millions of charities are left feeling the squeeze with an incredibly challenging year ahead.
Yahoo! launched Cyber Giving Week three years ago to encourage people to donate to their favorite causes during the last week of December -– when people typically scramble to get their tax deductions before the end of the year. Since then, we’ve helped raise millions of dollars for good causes because Yahoo! users like you stepped up to the challenge. And this year, more than ever, your generosity is vital to helping our communities’ most needy.
In that spirit, we’re promoting Cyber Giving Week all over Yahoo! this week.
For those who need an extra dose of inspiration, check out a tag cloud of this year’s most popular causes that link back to our Do Good Flickr group. Or upload and tag your own photos to raise awareness about issues you’re passionate about. Whether it’s a photo of a favorite charity in action, a portrait from the developing world, or a picture of some piece of nature you want to preserve, these images will motivate others to make a difference, too.
For the fourth year in a row, we’ve partnered with Network for Good to make it easy for you to donate to your favorite charity. So as the holiday season winds down, I hope you will keep the giving spirit alive by supporting a cause you care about. I, for one, will be making a donation to my local food bank. It’s simple, really — make a donation, upload and tag inspirational photos on Flickr, and tell your friends and family to do the same.
Connie Chan
Associate Manager, Yahoo! For Good
Tagged: Flickr, network for good, Yahoo! For Good
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Posted December 17th, 2008 at 6:41 am by Anne Toth, Privacy & Policy
3 Comments » / Filed in: Trends & News
At Yahoo!, data helps fuel the development of groundbreaking products for our users, partners and developers. We use all kinds of data for everything from powering innovative new products like Search Assist to showing you relevant news and information on our homepage to customizing advertising and content throughout Yahoo!’s network. We also analyze data to help fight the fraudsters that attack our systems.
Much of the data we use is information about our users’ online interests. The collection and use of that personal data demand that we take great care in managing and storing it. At Yahoo!, we feel a great responsibility to protect your privacy — we hold your trust sacred and work hard to earn it.
Today, we take another important step in our long record of privacy leadership. Last year, we committed to anonymizing the data we collect about your searches after 13 months. We are now reducing our retention time to 90 days with limited exceptions for fraud, security, and legal obligations. We’re also expanding our commitment to include data on page views, page clicks, ad views, and ad clicks.
What this means is that our content and advertising customization will remain cutting-edge and relevant to your interests — but the data we use to provide those services will only be kept for as long as we really need it.
How did we figure out “how long we really need it”? Led by my colleague Shane Wiley, the Insights Strategy Team worked with our business, product, and engineering teams around the globe to achieve the following goals:
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Meet the need for high quality consumer experience;
- Preserve the effectiveness of our advertising model and cutting-edge capabilities;
- Protect our users by fighting fraud and security threats; and
- Meet our legal obligations.
The result? We are setting a new industry benchmark by lowering the length of time we store non-anonymous data. Our new policy enables Yahoo! to continue providing the cutting-edge technologies and solutions advertisers and publishers expect while respecting your privacy.
Anne Toth
VP of Policy and Head of Privacy
Tagged: news, privacy
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Posted December 15th, 2008 at 1:03 pm by Ash Patel, Audience Products Division
20 Comments » / Filed in: Trends & News
There’s no question that the Internet has made life more productive and helped people do a better job of staying connected. But sometimes it feels more curse than blessing when you’re dealing with inbox overload (relevant fact = 100 billion email messages are sent every day!), unwieldy amounts of social connections, and the growing number of websites you have to visit to get things done. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about technologies that can ease the pain while also helping you do more things at once.
Today we’re beginning to roll out what we’re calling a “smarter inbox,” a more open and social Yahoo! Mail helps you better keep up with the information and people you care about most. The new Welcome Page surfaces messages based on people who are most relevant to you, letting you designate your preferred connections and automatically prioritizing messages so you see theirs first. We’ll also suggest more connections to you based on the people you already know.
Also, based on our new universal profile service, we let you see your connections’ activity updates across Yahoo!, such as the stories they’ve buzzed, the hotels they’ve reviewed on Yahoo! Travel, or shows they’ve rated on Yahoo! TV. In the future, those updates will come from things people are doing across the Web outside of Yahoo!. People today are communicating and connecting with others in various ways, from email, to blogs, to real-time messages. The Updates feature brings together these web activities together in one place to allow you to stay up to speed on a range of your connections’ activities and interests.
We’re also letting you do more in your e-mail experience by bringing third-party applications into Yahoo! Mail – a tremendous milestone for us. We’re just beginning a limited beta test, starting with applications like Flixter (share movie time, trailers and reviews), WordPress (post photos and links to a blog from your inbox), Xoopit (see and share all the photos stored in e-mail, including attachments and links to photo sharing sites, in one organized and consolidated “photo view” of the inbox.), and Yahoo! services like Flickr and Yahoo! Greetings – letting you get a lot more done from within your inbox. We expect developers from the Web’s top brands to build apps that we can integrate next year. Call it our new open way of life – unlocking popular Yahoo! products and letting outside developers create great new experiences for our users.
We are rolling out our smarter inbox in a phased process. Select Yahoo! Mail users in the U.S. and Australia will start seeing the new Welcome Page with messages from their connections, starting today. A more limited group of users in the U.S. will begin beta testing the open applications today. We plan to merge the social and open features into one Yahoo! Mail experience in the first half of 2009. You can read more on our Yahoo! Mail blog.
We’ve also made enhancements to My Yahoo! and the Yahoo! Toolbar to help you get more done. Starting today, you’ll be able to add third-party apps to your My Yahoo! homepage, beginning with a limited selection – like a calorie counter and apps that lets you fuel your addiction to “The Office” and “Heroes” — with more to come as developers explore our Yahoo! Application Platform. Read more on our Yahoo! Developer Network blog and the My Yahoo! blog. And we’re offering a sneak preview later this week of a new Yahoo! Toolbar (Windows IE only for now) that features the same apps we’re testing on our new homepage– you can check for email from Yahoo! and other popular e-mail providers, monitor and search for eBay items, and find local movie showtimes. You’ll also get personal search suggestions and be alerted when one of your connections has an activity update.
All this is part of our new Yahoo! Open Strategy, a major undertaking that opens Yahoo! to the creativity and innovation of outside developers and publishers like never before, while unlocking the latent social network that exists on Yahoo!. This is really just the beginning of what we have planned as we put you at the center of the best of the Web, wherever that may be.
Ash Patel
Executive Vice President, Audience Product Division
Tagged: news. my yahoo!, yahoo! mail, yahoo! open strategy, yahoo! toolbar, YOS
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Posted December 12th, 2008 at 5:38 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor
2 Comments » / Filed in: Product Pulse
It’s not always enough to have a flower named after you. Sometimes you just gotta have an act of Congress to honor that flower. Today is National Poinsettia Day, tribute to Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico and a botany aficionado. He discovered the crimson harbinger of the holidays while walking south of the border and introduced it up north. Here’s what we propagated this week:
- Delicious movement: Yes, your tastiest bookmarks can now be found on your mobile device. The Delicious team just launched their mobile site — http://m.delicious.com. It’s still in beta but it lets you browse your bookmarks, tags, inbox, and other info. You can also browse popular and recent bookmarks and tags from the Delicious community. It also means that you have a good reason to 86 your phone’s bookmarks.
- Tasty noise: Of the hundreds of millions of bookmarks on Delicious, a considerable chunk are audio files. The team (they’ve been busy!) is now making it possible for you to listen to those files with a new integration with FoxyPlayer from Yahoo! Music. Even cooler, it turns bookmarks into a playlist that you can control from your browser. Check out samples for Beck, Chopin, and Christmas. More here.
- Finding Flickr friends: There are days when you totally welcome the opportunity to get lost in an aimless exploration of your Flickr contacts’ images, but sometimes you just want a little order. Thankfully, the team just updated your contacts list page, making it much easier for you to navigate contacts — especially if you have a bevy. You can sort by name, contact type, number of photos, when you added them as a contact, and their last upload.
- Messenger merriment: The Messenger team brings you holiday cheer in the form of Emoticarolers, a personalized singing telegram sung by four of your favorite emoticons. You can customize the lyrics to a popular holiday tune (from Jingle Bells to Auld Lang Syne) and send it off to your friends. Their harmony is impressive, albeit somewhat Hal-like. Create your own here.
Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.
Tagged: del.icio.us, Flickr, messenger
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Posted December 11th, 2008 at 10:52 pm by Kenny Liao, Corporate Development
No Comments » / Filed in: Yahoo! For Good
Blue 42! Blue 42! Set… hut!
OK, so there was no actual football, but getting to build bikes for low-income children with members of the San Francisco 49ers was just as cool. As part of Yahoo!’s Purple Acts of Kindness, a monthly program that surprises and delights our local community with random acts of generosity, a group of Yahoos teamed together with the 49ers and TurningWheels for Kids this week to help build 49 bikes for boys and 49 bikes for girls. The bikes will be given to underprivileged children in San Jose, Calif., to enjoy during the holidays.
I was one of the lucky few who volunteered quickly enough before spots filled. Being an avid 49er fan, the event proved to be a great way to give back to the community while getting a chance to meet some of the players I’ve watched play on the gridiron. Upon arriving at the 49ers’ Santa Clara training facility, I was fortunate enough to be paired with Shaun Hill, the team’s starting quarterback. Together, we built 2 bikes –- 1 for a smaller boy and 1 for an older boy. Shaun focused on attaching wheels and brakes, while I worked with the handlebars.
In between interviews with the numerous camera crews roaming the area, I found myself chatting with a very down-to-earth, Kansas-bred guy. We talked about our similar experiences attending Kansas University’s summer basketball camp and meeting Coach Roy Williams. I also mentioned that his performance in the 49ers’ previous game had vaulted my fantasy football team to the playoffs, which he had a chuckle at. Unlike other events I’ve been to with professional athletes, Shaun was in no hurry to bolt after a few pictures. Rather, he spent time with me to make sure the bikes were put together well. We not only did this to build a good-looking bike, but more importantly, we wanted to build a safe bike that a child could enjoy for years to come.
Overall, participating in the bike build and watching Yahoos and 49ers work side-by-side to do something good for the community gave me a great feeling. In a season that often emphasizes materialism, it was wonderful to see people giving back to the community and doing something positive. Given the ever-worsening economic atmosphere, I know that the bikes we built will go a long way towards making a child’s holiday season a bit more joyful. That alone made the event a rousing success.
Kenny Liao
Corporate Strategy Analyst, Yahoo! Corporate Development
Photo from Yahoo! for Good. Additional photos found here.
Tagged: purple acts of kindness, Yahoo! For Good
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Posted December 10th, 2008 at 11:06 am by Jerry Yang, CEO & Chief Yahoo
54 Comments » / Filed in: General
As we announced in October, we’ve been aggressively managing our costs to bring them in line with the challenging economic conditions. Unfortunately, that means laying off employees –- by far the toughest part of being a manager. Here’s the email I sent to Yahoos today:
yahoos,
today, most of our layoffs in the US are happening, and they’ve been underway in other regions around the world.
this is a tough time for all of us and i wanted to take a moment to reach out to you.
saying goodbye to colleagues and friends is never easy. they all are dedicated members of our yahoo! family, who worked beside us and shared our passion.
but as you all know, we must take actions to better perform in today’s turbulent global economy. while we’ve found efficiencies in many parts of our business, laying off employees is unfortunately unavoidable. our difficult decision to let colleagues go reflects the changes we’re having to make to better align costs with revenues – something businesses in virtually every sector are also having to do.
for those who are affected by these layoffs, i am extremely grateful for your contributions to yahoo!. we realize the impact this will have on you. that’s why, consistent with our past practices, we’re making every effort to support you with severance packages and other services.
the reductions we’re making are very hard, but they are also very necessary — as we focus on the long-term health of our business. to those who are leaving us, i extend my heartfelt thanks on behalf of yahoos everywhere — you will be missed.
thanks,
jerry
Jerry Yang
Chief Yahoo and CEO
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Posted December 9th, 2008 at 11:42 am by Erin Carlson, Yahoo! For Good
3 Comments » / Filed in: Yahoo! For Good
I gotta say, this economy is making me approach the holiday season with more concern than usual. Battling crowds is one thing, but it feels like a particularly bad time to spend a ton of money
I’m not the only one who’s worried, and that’s why this year’s Yahoo! Green Gift Guide is chock full of gift ideas for any budget. We’ve got the Top 10 Green Gifts Under $30. But going beyond that, we put together ideas for ways you can make your own gifts and give gifts of experiences. Many of these ideas are free, and they also show that the holidays don’t always have to be about buying more stuff.
There are some great gift ideas for everyone on my list. At the risk of spoiling the surprise, Dad’s getting the business card holder made of a reused circuit board (for less than $20!). My sister with three kids gets the babysitting gift certificate or maybe the eco-friendly cleaning service. Her kids will get the do-it-yourself gum and candy kit and the Earthopoly game. For Mom, I’m thinking a cooking class or a driving monitor that tracks miles-per-gallon and gives tips on how to save gas. And for my wishlist, I’ve got my eye on this hot organic bamboo dress and the snazzy vegan heels.
The gifts are recommended by green experts, so you can feel confident they’re good for the planet. But they’re also really unique. I never thought about a rubber drum set or a coat rack made of wine bottles. Other items push the limits of “unique,” like an urban chicken coop – get fresh eggs right in your backyard! Or the oddest one yet – a bidet toilet seat that squirts water and blows warm air, all so you can avoid the resource use and waste of toilet paper.
The Green Gift Guide also has a ton of useful information beyond the gifts. The ideas for wrapping, decorating, and entertaining in an eco-friendly way also save money. And it answers those burning questions like, “Which is better, a real or a fake Christmas tree?”
So check it out. Every time I pull up the Green Gift Guide, my holiday anxiety goes down, and my hope goes up for a season of giving that makes both my family and my bank account happy.
Erin Carlson
Director, Yahoo! For Good
Tagged: Yahoo! For Good, yahoo! green
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Posted December 8th, 2008 at 8:00 am by Steve Schultz, Yahoo! Real Estate
6 Comments » / Filed in: Trends & News
2008 has obviously been a tough year for the real estate market –- we have surging inventories, record foreclosures, and banks with tight lending policies. But if you’re thinking about jumping into the market, 2009 could be a great year to find your dream home at an affordable price. The team at Yahoo! Real Estate has been working hard to make the house-hunting process easier and more efficient.
For the prospective homebuyer, it all starts with search. According to the National Association of Realtors, 87% of homebuyers use the Internet to search for their next home. More importantly, 32% cited the Internet as the place where they found the home they eventually purchased – a fourfold increase since 2001. So I’m pleased to announce the launch of Yahoo! Real Estate’s new home search experience. Head to our homepage, enter your search criteria and hit search.
Our research indicates that homebuyers want their searches to be fast and efficient, and they want as much data and multimedia as they can get their hands on. So our pages now load twice as fast and our photos are now four times bigger. And as you refine your search parameters (price, number of bedrooms, etc.), the listing results update automatically. We also enabled our listing partners to provide much richer home specs, and you’ll find deeper neighborhood information and recommendations for comparable listings. We’re also testing new neighborhood profile videos – we’re starting with San Francisco listings, with more major cities to come.
This launch is the result of our new open real estate strategy. For many years, Yahoo! Real Estate had an exclusive relationship with Prudential Real Estate. While Prudential remains an important partner, earlier this year we opened Yahoo! to a wide range of home data sources, including more than 70 of the top real estate brokers, 50 multiple listings services and 40 real estate listings services. We now source over 3.2 million for-sale listings (excluding foreclosures and new construction listings) and expose them to over 5.5 million people a month, according to comScore.
There’s far more innovation ahead. We have a steady stream of new features due out early next year that includes a greater emphasis on property photos and meaty new personalization and sharing services. In the meantime, happy house-hunting.
Steve Schultz
Senior Director, Yahoo! Real Estate
Tagged: news, search, yahoo! real estate
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Posted December 4th, 2008 at 12:01 pm by Kakul Srivastava, Flickr
5 Comments » / Filed in: Trends & News
Ask anyone on the street if they have photos in their wallet and you might find a handful. But on their phone? That’s another story. Over the last year, our team at Flickr has seen a more than 50% increase in the number of people who have accessed our mobile site. And it can’t go anywhere but up from here.
That’s why we’re rolling out a radically overhauled m.flickr.com site today. What we’re most excited about is that now –- for the first time -– you’ll actually be able to play Flickr videos back on your phone. Ever since we launched video, we’ve let you upload your “long photos” directly from your cell, but we think the playback functionality is pretty huge. It’s based on the Yahoo! Video Platform and takes advantage of its ability to serve content to a wide variety of phones, screen sizes, and video/audio codecs. We’ll be rolling video playback out over the coming weeks for handsets that support streaming video, starting with the iPhone and iPod Touch today and more to come.
The new m.flickr.com sports a sleek new interface that makes it significantly easier to view your photostream and sets, and puts recent activity (yours and your contacts’) front and center. We’ve also added a bunch of new capabilities, like letting you add contacts, favorite images, and change your privacy and permission settings –- all while you’re out walking the dog. And, in support of our “eyes of the world” vision, we’ve also added the ability to explore the latest “interestingness” photos.
iPhone users have been playing with our new mobile incarnation since we released our beta in October and now we’re expanding the experience to any smart phone that supports browsers like Webkit, Firefox Mobile, and Opera Mobile.
The mobile phone has become central to how many of our users take pictures and how they share their view of the world with the important people in their life. We think the new Flickr mobile experience reflects all the cool possibilities that today’s advanced and rich mobile web has to offer, combined with all the functionality Flickr members know and love.
So grab your phone, bookmark m.fllickr.com, and enjoy photos and videos with a big smile on that small screen.
UPDATE: Just a clarification. Video playback is available for videos uploaded yesterday onward. Over the next few months, we’ll work to make the entire catalog of videos viewable on our mobile site.
Kakul Srivastava
Flickr General Manager
Tagged: Flickr, iphone, mobile, news, yahoo! video
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Posted December 1st, 2008 at 9:31 am by Vera Chan, Yahoo! Buzz
3 Comments » / Filed in: Trends & News
Beware: The task of looking back at 2008 could induce whiplash.
Last year, I introduced our annual review of search trends and touched on the subject on how a billion (or so) searches can sketch a portrait of a culture in motion. The motion this year was volatile, to say the least, what with the American presidential elections, the Beijing Olympics, and a doggedly stubborn global economic morass.
This time, the Yahoo! Year in Review is even bigger and more ambitious, the better to reflect the potent issues that rumbled in news and searches. Editors and producers from throughout Yahoo!–news, sports, Buzz Log, Buzz, and much more–investigated the themes that emerged for you this year, including economy, politicians, Olympians, and influential women.
While 2007 was a time of environmental activism and a tech evolution, this year showed your growing sophistication and reliance on the Web in the political process. From the primaries to Election Day, you went online in droves to register to vote, donate campaign funds, check out primary results, figure out what a delegate was, scrutinize the Electoral College, and vet the candidates, their associates, and even their family members. Likely (factcheck.org) and unlikely (snopes) sources became your stop to check rumors.
And lest you think I’m avoiding the subject–yes, Britney Spears has once again emerged as the top search in 2008. Even the music artist’s story this time around symbolized the year’s sober mood…and she has some fascinating company in the Top 10.
Visit our site to check out other trends in search and news. To compare what intrigued you in 2007 versus 2008, take a gander at the Flashback overview, which also links to previous years’ lists. Finally, a late-breaking blog will introduce more top 10 lists of 2008 throughout December.
Vera H-C Chan
Senior Editor, Buzz Log
Tagged: yahoo! buzz, yahoo! search, year in review
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