Here is a compilation of Yahoo!-related news that came up this week. Flickr is opening up to the micro-blogging community by using the Twitter API while the Delicious bookmark sharing website is making its way to Google Chrome. Yahoo.com has broke a traffic record to the NYT. The company has revised its data center plan near the Niagara Falls. Also this week, the music industry show its greediness and vainly hopes to get money from Yahoo!, Microsoft and Real networks. Check out the press digest after the break.

Yahoo! Mail weekend Maintenance
Beginning today, you may experience problems accessing your Yahoo! Mail account. If you are one of the very few affected, have no fear. It should be available again is as short as 30 minutes. Read more >>

Delicious built right into Chrome
Y! has released a test version of a Delicious social bookmarking extension for Chrome, one of the strongest indications so far that the technology foundation is coming to fruition in Google's browser. Extensions still must be specifically enabled through a command-line switch on the developer version of Chrome, and Google recently broke extensions compatibility through an update, so the technology clearly is immature. In an official statetment the Delicious team said : "Delicious extension (alpha version) for Google chrome is now available (You may have to save the file on disk and then drag on Chrome window to trigger the install. You need to run chrome with the -enable- extensions flag to use the extension). It allows you to sign-in and post bookmarks to your delicious account. It adds a button on the omni bar for signin/bookmarking and and also allows you to bookmark using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+D. The button becomes visible after a page is fully loaded. " Read more >>

MCS sue Microsoft, Yahoo, Real
The suit appears to have been initiated by Music Copyright Solutions (MCS), which claims to administer copyrights for more than 45,000 compositions. MCS is named as the lead plaintiff, along with a number of songwriters including Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad fame. These folks allege that Microsoft, Yahoo, and RealNetworks improperly licensed the rights to more than 200 compositions that they offered as on-demand streams or limited downloads via the Zune Marketplace, Yahoo Music, and Rhapsody. Surely these companies paid somebody for the rights to offer these songs. But there's a catch, which TechDirt pointed out earlier Tuesday: these companies may have licensed the rights to the recordings, but that doesn't mean they licensed the rights to the compositions (also known as publishing rights). MCS is seeking damages of $150,000 per violation. Read more >>

Flickr embraces Twitter sharing
Flickr has launched Twitter integration. The Flickr Blog reports that Twitter functionality has been added to the photo management tool. You can upload photos to both Flickr and Twitter, or use the functionality to tweet about an already existing photograph. The system will automatically shorten the url using a "flic.kr" URL. Read more >>

Yahoo! alters plan slightly for Lockport site
TOWN OF LOCKPORT — Back-to-back public hearings will be held Tuesday regarding siting of a Yahoo! data center in the town industrial park. The Town of Lockport Industrial Development Agency will hold a hearing on a proposed Payment-In-Lieu-of-Taxes agreement with Yahoo! at 3 p.m. Tuesday in the IDA conference room, Town Hall Annex. The IDA has offered to sell Yahoo! a 30-acre site in the industrial park, on which it would build a 191,000 square foot facility to house a data center; the site is bounded by Junction Road on the west, Enterprise Drive on the south and Crown Drive on the east. The sale price is $450,000. Yahoo!'s application indicates the data center would employ approximately 75 people in full-time jobs; and construction would spark 250 short-term jobs. The center would be built in two phases, office and data center space first, then more data center space; work is projected to begin in August and be completed by September 2010. Read more >>

P.Baldwin : SVP of Global Integrated Marketing, Brand Mgnt at Y!
Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) announced today that Penny Baldwin has been appointed to senior vice president, global integrated marketing and brand management. She assumes this newly created position immediately and reports to Yahoo!'s chief marketing officer, Elisa Steele. Baldwin will lead the company's global brand efforts, and is responsible for developing and executing Yahoo!'s brand marketing approach including brand management, corporate messaging, integrated marketing and advertising. "One of Yahoo!'s greatest assets is its brand," said Steele. "Our integrated, global approach is critical to our success and we have a deep business commitment to fulfill our promise to our users, customers and partners. Penny is uniquely qualified to lead the effort and her leadership, experiences, knowledge and skills are excellent additions to the Y! marketing team." She is a 20-year veteran of global brand strategy development and execution across all internal and market-facing touch points. Read more >>

Link from Yahoo breaks traffic records at NYT
Behold the power of Yahoo: A link at the top of the site's front page helped send more than 9 million page views to The New York Times in the span of two hours last week, breaking records for web traffic at the newspaper. That's per a memo sent to staffers this morning, which said the Times' servers withstood the deluge "brilliantly." But as we've seen with other news sites, the huge spike didn't produce much advertising revenue — or, at least, not the copious coin you might expect from traffic at a rate of 7,300 hits per second. That's because the Times could only serve cheap, remnant ads to its unanticipated visitors. Read more >>
Check this out...

• June 29, 2009 — Application wishlist and ideas for Yahoo! Mail
• June 28, 2009 — Discover a list of useful Yahoo! Mail hidden tips
• June 24, 2009 — Yahoo! Mail filters too limited... again
• March 30, 2009 — [Culture 2.0] AOL wanted to buy Yahoo! for $2 million
• March 26, 2009 — Reaction to > Dear Carol Bartz: You Need To Fix Yahoo Mail
• March 24, 2009 — The business of spam is going freelance
• March 24, 2009 — Hack : Yahoo! Mail inbox RSS in your Firefox sidebar
• March 24, 2009 — Reaction to : Three ways Yahoo could become great again
• March 23, 2009 — Yahoo! Mail to identify Pentagon's hacker
• March 23, 2009 — The most ridiculous failure of MyWay.com

There are times when I hear about few Yahoos that have stumbled on my website. In those days I feel like what I write could actually be heard by the Sunnyvale giant. Yahoo! CE0 Carol Bartz joined the company in January 2009 following Jerry Yang. This past semester we, users, have observed lots of changes. Stockholders have regained hopes. And the company is shaping up for a brighter future.

I position myself as a user. I guess I am probably what you'd call a "power-user" though. I do not own any shares nor will I pretend to have any business/management knowledge. Those are the feelings of a 30 year old man who works as a French journalist and have only analyzed what's going on here and there on the web. Unlike many medias out there I wont have the pretension to "guide", "inform" or "teach" Mrs Bartz anything. I just hope this message will somewhat caught her web surfing some time.

Dear Mrs Bartz,

The day you arrived at Yahoo! many people were wondering how you'd save the company. One of the strategies followed by your team is to evaluate what services should be kept and which ones should be gone. Those past six months I believe Yahoo! has done a great job in this respect. For several years the Brickhouse had launched several concepts that turned out to be quite disappointing. And I felt really bad to see Yahoos wasting their energy when they could have focused on the main products of the network. The termination of several projects inevitably led to various waves of lay-off. Even though I understand this is a difficult decision to make, it remained a smart thing to do.

The Golden Age
I have been following Yahoo! for several years and more than once I said that the golden age of the company was between 2002 and 2004. At least for me. In those days many Yahoo! services were actually ahead of their times. This was the case of the Communications products like Yahoo! Mail, or Yahoo! Messenger. The PIM products were well integrated one with another and did not bear any unfinished pages like it is the case today. Yahoo! was not "below" their competitors in terms of functionality either. It's not a rant, just an objective observation. It's not secret that even Yahoo! Mail Plus subscribers cannot enjoy IMAP when GMail or AOL provide the protocol for free on all platforms. In those days, it was also the golden age of the Launchcast radio station. Today's radio-streaming services like Deezer, Spotify or Last.fm are trying hard to provide a good service but after a couple months the user have to bear new restrictions because of copyright/geograhic issues. Consequently all the efforts put into customizing a station are vain and useless. It's too bad Launchcast had to go.

No more peanut butter
It seems the web 2.0 bubble distracted Yahoo! from its main goal : to provide quality services. Years after years we heard about new acquisitions: Oddpost, Blo.gs, Flickr, Upcoming.org, Delicious... it seemed the list would never stopped. I had a hard time accepting the fact that these new technologies would hardly be integrated into the network and remained untouched to the point of cannibalizing other Yahoo! properties. And the Peanut Butter Manifesto was written. And in some way, everybody knew something was very wrong. I remember at one point I had four bookmark sharing websites : the old Yahoo! bookmarks, the new Yahoo! bookmarks, Delicious and MyWeb (1 and 2) !

A core service : Mail
Today, I understand that Yahoo! aims to put many efforts to develop its social dimension. The Open Strategy is appearing on several units of the network. Yet, I feel like Yahoo! is still forgetting its main goals. At the 2008 CES, Jerry Yang unveiled a social inbox concept which turned out to be developed a year later. But the fact is : the social inbox is not built on a strong basis. When thinking webmail people want solid features that "just work". Why do I get the feeling the Mail Plus option is useless today ? Why do get the feeling there is no one in charge of finishing up the Mail options pages ? Why do I get the feeling Yahoo! has a poor email filtering management compared to Gmail or Zoho Mail or worse, Hotmail ? How can we ask million of users to adopt a social mail box if it does not provide today's common features ? Just take a look at the comments posted in the Yahoo! Mail Group. Those simply reflect the position of your 250 million users worldwide.

Are we going in the wrong direction again ? Cause just like before, in some way, everybody knows something is very wrong. Getting the mojo back is good, getting the mojo back with quality products is even better.

The search engine potential
Search is another field very important to Yahoo! and as a user I clearly need a refresh of what Yahoo! Search is and what it can provide. The Yahoo! search gallery simply is a great idea and this is where Yahoo! should focus in terms of marketing. The only problem is that people just do not know about it. Nope, they just DO NOT, however hard you may try to convince yourself with data and studies...Yahoo! Search has become an on-demand search engine, an open search engine. Something even Google would dream of. Cause let's be frank, getting your mojo back will mean getting people off Google, that is 80% of the web surfers worldwide. Therefore it is my opinion that Yahoo! should invest in a giant marketing campaign just to promote that personal search engine Yahoo! can become. This is new, this is fresh and this has enormous potential. Fresh as in getting back that brand value.

This letter was simply a way for me to believe that after the current strategy led by many product closings Yahoo! would centralize their efforts on what makes the brand really exists and where the users actually are : the Communications services and the Search Engine. And I know I'm far from being the only one to hope so.

Fingers crossed.

Check this out...

• March 4, 2009 — Carol Bartz : "There's a new Mail coming, it's a lot better"
• March 3, 2009 — Carol Bartz: "I don't use Yahoo! Maps. I use Google Maps"
• February 26, 2009 — The promises of Carol Bartz

Yahoo!'s Open Strategy is progressively shaping up and we discover new applications from third party developers both in Yahoo! Mail, in Yahoo! Search Monkey or on My Yahoo!. If I found Search Monkey to be really powerful, on the other hand, it feels that that the "Open Apps" for Yahoo! Mail and My Yahoo! are not really amazing.

The application named Organizer was a nice idea but unfortunately it failed organizing my inbox the way I wanted. Yet the idea to have more control over my inbox is nice and I believe Yahoo! should immediately focus on their filter options. Being a Yahoo! Members Plus member it only allows 200 individual filters when competitors enable me to organize my inbox by filtering entire @domain.com.

In terms of applications, I'd love to see a file manager for all my attachments. A file manager powered by Yahoo! though. Something similar to what Yahoo! has brought to the Classic version of Yahoo! Mail. Equally it would be great to see a native photo manager that is not powered by Xoopit. An option to bookmark certain queries inside Yahoo! Mail would be quite convenient as well. Since it would be running right inside the Mail platform I do not believe this would be too hard to create. I forward my phone voicemail from Orange France directly to my email and filter them to a specific folder. Those audio files are using the .ra extension and require Real Player. This RealMedia Streaming Media audio type is supported by the online file converter Zamzar as well as many others. I believe an audio/video player and/or file converter would therefore be great for media attachments.

More specifically I believe that applications should open up in their own tabs unlike the Flickr one which is kinda useless. If we talk openness then there is a price : traffic. If third party developers are willing to do that then Yahoo! should certainly do it as well and let user fully use the app from within Yahoo! Mail. Apart from the developer forum, it would be great to have a place where users could discuss what applications they're hoping for in the future. I've opened a discussion in the Yahoo! Mail Group do not hesitate to share your ideas.

Check this out...

• July 4, 2009 — Yahoo! News Roundup | Press Review | 06/29-07/03
• June 28, 2009 — Discover a list of useful Yahoo! Mail hidden tips
• June 24, 2009 — Yahoo! Mail filters too limited... again
• March 26, 2009 — Reaction to > Dear Carol Bartz: You Need To Fix Yahoo Mail
• March 24, 2009 — The business of spam is going freelance
• March 24, 2009 — Hack : Yahoo! Mail inbox RSS in your Firefox sidebar
• March 23, 2009 — Yahoo! Mail to identify Pentagon's hacker
• March 21, 2009 — [Culture 2.0] Hotmail first wanted to sell to Yahoo!
• March 11, 2009 — Interview With Ryan Kennedy: hacking Yahoo! Mail
• March 5, 2009 — Yahoo! Mail tops competitors with a huge traffic

Don't you just love it when web developers hide Easter eggs in their web applications ? Well it's all the more exciting when those Easter eggs are actually useful. Those past few days we've heard a lot about the Gmail Ninja thing. Well, on the Yahoo! Mail Group, a member named jakk9406 posted a list of very cool Yahoo! Mail tips. Some of them may be known to hardcore Yahoo! users but clearly not all of them. Those tips apply to the All New Yahoo! Mail (by opposition to the Classic version). Check out the full list after the break and enjoy!

Please note that on a Mac the Ctrl key is sometimes replaced with the Command (Apple) key :

Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Up/Down Key :
Configure extended navigation

Alt+click on Yahoo! Mail logo :
shows version, build, date, farm in popup

Ctrl+alt click on Yahoo! Mail logo :
Loads "Y! mail beta log"

Ctrl+click on Yahoo! Mail logo :
Loads Y! mail help in new window

Ctrl+click on message search [Go] button :
Shows search tips

Ctrl+click on message subject :
View all messages of a thread (uses search of message subject)

Ctrl+shift click on "Help" menu :
Load an extensive menu of advanced controls and links

Ctrl+shift click on Yahoo! Mail logo :
Toggle debug mode (still not sure exactly what this is)

Ctrl+shift click on message search [Go] button :
Pop-ups advanced mail search

Ctrl+shift+click on "help", click "show chat overlay", reload the page :
Get Yahoo! mail beta chat/messenger integration on any farm

Note that you may also :
Drag a message tab to a folder : Move a tabbed message straight to a folder quickly and easily

or to go to
http://us.mg1.mail.yahoo.com/dc/launch?sysreq=ignore :
Run the All New Yahoo! mail regardless of system requirements check results (may need to replace mg1 with f###)

http://us.mg1.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?ymv=0 :
Takes you to Yahoo! Mail classic for current session only (may need to replace mg1 with f###)

Have found something else ? Feel free to contact me and get the credit here.

Check this out...

• March 24, 2009 — Hack : Yahoo! Mail inbox RSS in your Firefox sidebar
• July 4, 2009 — Yahoo! News Roundup | Press Review | 06/29-07/03
• June 29, 2009 — Application wishlist and ideas for Yahoo! Mail
• June 24, 2009 — Yahoo! Mail filters too limited... again
• March 26, 2009 — Reaction to > Dear Carol Bartz: You Need To Fix Yahoo Mail
• March 24, 2009 — The business of spam is going freelance
• March 23, 2009 — Yahoo! Mail to identify Pentagon's hacker
• March 21, 2009 — [Culture 2.0] Hotmail first wanted to sell to Yahoo!
• March 11, 2009 — Interview With Ryan Kennedy: hacking Yahoo! Mail
• March 5, 2009 — Yahoo! Mail tops competitors with a huge traffic

Read the full transcript here

Check this out...

• April 1, 2009 — News round-up: Messenger, iPhone, Sideline, Ideology
• March 26, 2009 — French Education Ministry: "Google is the only search engine"
• March 24, 2009 — The business of spam is going freelance
• March 24, 2009 — Videos - Interview: Dee Adams, Yahoo! Sr Design Specialist
• March 24, 2009 — Reaction to : Three ways Yahoo could become great again
• March 19, 2009 — Yahoo! shamelessly promotes Internet Explorer 8
• March 19, 2009 — Searching images get easier on Yahoo!
• March 11, 2009 — Interview With Ryan Kennedy: hacking Yahoo! Mail
• March 9, 2009 — Will a Yahoo-Microsoft deal be finalized ?
• March 6, 2009 — Yahoo!'s aggressive mobile strategy worldwide

Check this out...

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