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Yesterday Yahoo announced that it will discontinue The Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop and refocus its development efforts on the main Apache Hadoop distribution. In a blog post, Yahoo VP of Software Engineering Eric Baldeschwieler writes that Yahoo will work more closely with Apache in the future. This leaves only two major distributions of Hadoop: Apache Hadoop and Cloudera's enterprise-focused Hadoop.

More and more, both TV networks and app developers are relying on the fact that watching TV is no longer a passive act to which we apply our undivided attention. From check-in apps like Miso and Get Glue to TV shows like Glee and Community, they want to assure that we watch our TV with our smartphone or tablet in hand, a-tweeting and a-checking in all the while.

According to a recent study by Yahoo's advertising division, the TV watching crowd is ripe for this type of prime time interactivity, with 86% of mobile Internet users fondling their mobile device while watching the old boob tube.

When an internal announcement leaked out of Yahoo last month that it was "sunsetting" popular social bookmarking service Delicious, that service's users flew into a panic. Yahoo quickly backtracked on the plans and the service remains up and running, if minimally supported.

Would Flickr survive the hemorrhaging at its parent company Yahoo? That was the next logical question. Today Flickr power user Thomas Hawk did a little investigation of how many $25/year paid Pro accounts and thus how much annual revenue he estimates Flickr contributes to Yahoo. Hawk's methodology seems reasonable, if generous, and led to the conclusion that Flickr probably brings in around $50 million in annual revenue. Minus expenses, the profit it brings Yahoo is probably negligible. In other words, Yahoo has little economic incentive to support, maintain or grow one of the biggest photo sharing sites on the web and the place many of us pay to store our photos online. That's cause for concern. Note: Former Flickr chief software architect Cal Henderson responds in comments below, saying that Hawk's methodology is "deeply flawed" and that advertising makes up a large amount of Flickr's revenue. So take the following with a grain of salt now that we've heard that from a former insider.

Last week at the Consumer Electronics Show we got a sneak peek at the latest incarnation of Yahoo Connected TV and we were excited about what we saw: the first Internet TV device to bring passive and personalized Internet content to its users.

Watching a boxing match? Cast a vote in an online poll on who's going to stay upright and who's hitting the mat. Checking out the shopping channel? Purchase items directly from the comfort of your sofa without pulling out the laptop. Yahoo Connected TV is about to change how we think of Internet TV forever... but is it edgy enough to really lead the pack?

Here's a twist. Yahoo is launching a native Flickr app for Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 later this month that leverages Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.

The app connects Flickr data with Windows Azure via an API. Using Windows Azure, Yahoo is able to optimize the images for the Windows 7 environments and on the Windows Phone 7 devices.

For example, let's say someone is using the Flickr app on a Windows 7 tablet device and decides to view one of their albums. The app makes a call to Windows Azure, which computes the context for the way the image should be viewed on the device.

In October, Google engineer Brian Kennish debuted Facebook Disconnect, a Chrome extension that wipes out virtually all evidence of Facebook from your Web experience. Since then, Kennish has quit his job with Google to focus entirely on Disconnect, another extension for Chrome and RockMelt that aims to help users to block the larger scope of tracking devices on the increasingly social Web.

Over at Quora, Tripline founder and CEO Byron Dumbrill answers the question, "Why did Delicious fail?" Dumbrill joined Yahoo in 2006, about nine months after it acquired the bookmarking service, and his explanation corresponds with what we've been hearing for several years about its fate. Delicious was back-burnered while the company focused on Yahoo Bookmarks. It was a second class citizen, a fact that Yahoo tacitly acknowledged in its statement earlier today when it said that Delicious needs a home where "it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive." Dumbrill talks about that internal competition in his full answer after the jump.

"The big open source news in 2010 is that open source became essentially invisible," writes outgoing Canonical COO Matt Asay in his 2010 year in review column for The Register. It's not that the media stopped reporting on open source Asay explains. In fact, according to Google News, the number of stories mentioning the phrase "open source" roughly doubled. What's happening is that open source is moving behind the scenes, thanks in large part to cloud computing.

People all over the geek-o-sphere are mourning the loss of social bookmarking service Delicious, which Yahoo! announced internally today will soon be shut down. Delicious wasn't the only acquired startup service the company admitted it was going to drown in a well like an unwanted kitten, though.

Yahoo's excellent location sharing clearinghouse Fire Eagle, the social events calendar Upcoming.org and the innovative browser music player FoxyTunes will all be merged into other products, but at least they'll live. Due to die: MyBlogLog. Let's take a moment to appreciate what MyBlogLog could have been; it captured and made available so much data about the social web that it could have been the most important of all those services.