Pullara is a leader in Yahoo's work on Open Web standards and the open web community appears enthusiastic about his promotion at Yahoo! For full coverage of the move, see our write up on Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's blog covering new hires in tech and new media.

"Yahoo is making a major push into search personalization and recommendations - the overall project is called "Shoposphere" and the major feature being released is called "Pick Lists". Their goal is to move ecommerce towards what they call "me commerce". Any registered Yahoo user can create a Pick List."

The Yahoo Shoposphere site has more details on Pick Lists:

"Pick Lists let you share the stuff you love and the stuff that matters to you with everyone or your friends... on the Shoposphere, throughout Yahoo! Shopping, by email, and even through RSS feeds.

Make a good one and it could even show up as one of the highest rated Pick Lists on the Shoposphere."

More analysis from me as I look further into it... I do like the "me commerce" bit :-).

Yahoo! Glue search results include web search, images, news, blog search, Wikipedia and YouTube videos. That's right - in the India version at least Yahoo! displayed search results from both Google's YouTube and Google Blogsearch. The end result - all these links on one page - is pretty awesome.

Yahoo's Open Strategy

Yahoo, of course, would prefer to lock its users into using its services. However, Yahoo has also been a major proponent of OpenID and a lot of the recent announcements around Yahoo Open, SearchMonkey, and allowing more third-party content on Yahoo's sites make us believe that Yahoo might indeed be willing to allow users to bring credentials from other providers to Yahoo. The easier it is to log into a service, the more like you are to use it and to return to it.

Smart Move?

Do you think this would be a smart move by Yahoo? Or should they just throw their weight behind OpenID? Would you be more likely to use Yahoo services if you didn't have to sign up with Yahoo?

The chart above is the Yahoo one, which has fallen over the last year. But MarketClub maintains that Yahoo potentially will gain 24% when it moves over 30.00 (it's currently 28.35), whereas they think Google will probably gain only 11% when it breaks over 513.00 (currently it is 481.75).

But I tend to agree that Yahoo has plenty of fight left in it yet, from both a tech and stock standpoint. What do you think?

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. According to the Wikipedia entry, JSON's simplicity has "resulted in its widespread use, especially as an alternative to XML in Ajax".

I had the pleasure of speaking to Toni recently and I know the Yahoo folks have lots of plans around APIs. As Yahooligan Matt McAlister recently wrote in reference to a Scott Gatz speech: "Kevin Burton asked about public APIs. Scott pointed him to developer.yahoo.net where the current APIs are posted and some community efforts to help facilitate more activity. He said, Yahoo! is still testing some concepts, and the company knows that this is incredibly important. And Scott said we can expect to see a lot more in that area. "

It's important to note that Hitwise bases its data solely on US traffic. Yahoo is also very popular in Asia. There, these numbers might look slightly different.

As rumors about the future of Yahoo continue swirling around the net, these numbers from Hitwise give us at least some idea that selling only its search business to Microsoft (or anybody else) would still allow the core of Yahoo to continue doing just fine. At the same time, though, the rest of Yahoo would become even more dependent on Google for its traffic.

Now, of course, the specter of another round of rumors and announcements around a possible merger between Yahoo and Microsoft will rear its head once more. After all, the idea of the advertising deal with Google was born out of the perceived necessity to fend off a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo, and Microsoft itself lobbied against the Google-Yahoo deal in Washington.

However, it is also worth pointing out that, at this point, Microsoft itself might not have too much interest in acquiring Yahoo anymore. After all, Microsoft itself is now trying to transform its own business and a merger with Yahoo would only be a distraction at this point.

It's certainly bringing the read/write web closer to mainstream and that's a good thing! A read/write portal... yes I like that idea (of course Marc Canter calls it a DLA).

NB: I see they haven't connected Flickr to it yet - when I tried to add some photos it sent me to something called Yahoo! Photos. I'll wait for Flickr thanks...

Anyways, if you're a regular reader of Read/Write Web and you'd like an invite - let me know (readwriteweb AT gmail.com). If we haven't communicated before via email or phone, then tell me a bit about why you read my blog. I don't mean to be an invite snob, it's just that I'd like to at least know who you are before I invite you onto my friends list. :-)

Oh and p.s., expect a delay before you receive an invite - Yahoo 360 isn't aknowledging my email address update and verification, so right now it prevents me from sending out invites! This is a beta, so I'll forgive them :-)

Update, the next day: I still can't send out any invites, because the "unverified" email address bug hasn't been fixed yet (I've now verified it 3 times, tried changing my address again, etc). So sorry to those waiting for an invite from me, I'll send one out as soon as I can. [fixed now] Also I'm not sure whether my Yahoo 360 blog is viewable to the outside world...

From a design pov:
- They've toned down the blue colour of the links.
- News sources are now highlighted more - AP will be pleased, as they're gung-ho on branding their content.
- Tabs are now used for the section menu, enabling them to go from 3 columns to 2 and so free up white space.

[nb just as I finish that last sentence, Yahoo has flicked the switch and made the new design live on http://news.yahoo.com].

The things I like the best though are the increased focus on RSS and search, and the integration with My Yahoo. From the intro page:

Not only does the new design allow users to subscribe to non-traditional news sources, but the "dive deeper into topics" buttons are a fantastic example of topic search n' subscribe applied to a major media website. Congrats to the Yahoo News team! I know that I have some Yahoo staff subscribed to my blog, so perhaps my RSS and Topic-based Search evangelism is paying off in some small way :-)

p.s. Google, please sit up and take notice - instead of spending your time rejecting fantastic news sources.

1) Free text messaging to mobile phone numbers (but only available in the US, Canada, India and the Philippines);

2) Integrated instant messaging with Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.

Techcrunch has more details of tonight's news and some great comparisons. For me, Gmail's Web Native functionality still wins out - although lately I've been experiencing frustrating performance issues with Gmail.

Just Burn a CD

As we reported last week, Yahoo was already advising its customers to circumvent its own DRM system by just burning copies of their songs onto audio CDs and then ripping them back onto their computers as DRM-free MP3s. Apparently, though, not all customers were satisfied with this solution, though given the new solution, enterprising customers could also, of course, now burn their songs to CDs and still ask for their money back from Yahoo.

Costly Precedent

Yahoo is setting a (costly) precedent here for other music services than run into similar problems.  When MSN Music shut down, it was originally going to take its licensing servers offline within a year, but because of customer complaints, it is keeping them online until the end of 2011. MSN Music is not planning on returning any money to its customers, though.

"Tonight we are launching a full post rss reader in the new Yahoo Mail beta. If you are in the beta, you’ll automatically get the new features.

RSS in mail makes perfect sense for a few reasons: 1) people already spend a lot of time in their Mail experience, why shouldn’t personally relevant content be there too 2) While you read RSS you are probably gonna want to forward good stuff you find 3) Hundreds of millions of users use Yahoo Mail, so if we want to reach the masses, we need to go where they are."

That third point is the biggie - millions more people use Yahoo! Mail than use the MyYahoo portal. And most of them probably haven't been directly exposed to RSS feeds yet.

I'll analyze this news fully tomorrow, but for now check out TechCrunch and Podtech.net for all the initial details.

Yahoo Video Search lets users filter searches by the length of the videos. Search queries can also be restricted to official videos from a band or artist. Just like it does with non-music related searches, Yahoo also features recently shared videos from Twitter at the top of the search results.

Yahoo Video displays videos from services like YouTube, DailyMotion or MetaCafe right on the search results page. For the vast majority of video services like Artist Direct, however, users have to leave the site to see these videos. In our tests, this new feature mostly worked as advertised, though it sometimes showed songs that weren't part of the album we had selected.

Reaction to Google Music Search?

It is worth noting that while Google launched its new Google Music Search service last month, Yahoo also offers a seamless integration with Rhapsody on its site.