WebProNews

Yahoo Survey Finds Optimism for Holiday Online Retail

Yahoo conducted a survey of small business online retailers to find out how they think they'll perform this upcoming holiday season compared to previous years. "Surprisingly, based on the current economic landscape, the results show an optimistic outlook, with over 60 percent of the Yahoo! merchants surveyed expecting sales to be the same as most years or even stronger," a representative for Yahoo tells WebProNews.

Yahoo Showing Tweets for News Results

Yahoo Search is now including a new Twitter feature in search results for select topics that are in the news. For example, if you search for "health care reform," or "obama," you will get a section for news results, which contains tabs for news, photos, videos, and Twitter. The results look something like this:

Yahoo Messenger Goes Video with New Version

Update: Yahoo Messenger 10 is now out of beta. Features include: high quality video calling, Yahoo Updates view of your contacts list, and availability in 16 languages. Original Article: Yahoo Messenger Version 10 is now available in beta. New features include enhanced video calling, courtesy of GIPS, friend updates from Yahoo, Flickr, Twitter, and others through the new updates view, and improved language support.

Yahoo Go To Get The Boot

Yahoo Go, a mobile application that links users to a number of different services (including mail, news, and weather), is going to cease doing much of anything in the near future.  Yahoo has decided to concentrate its mobile efforts elsewhere. In an email sent to Yahoo Go users, the company announced, "Yahoo! Go will be discontinued on January 12, 2010, at 12:00 a.m. PST, so that we may focus on simplifying and enhancing your future mobile Web experiences.  After this date, you will no longer be able to use Yahoo! Go 2.0 or 3.0 from your mobile phone."

Yahoo and Microsoft May Be Close to Signing

Kara Swisher of Boomtown, who is normally a pretty reliable source of industry scoops, is reporting that Yahoo and Microsoft may be very close to finally signing their much-anticipated search and advertising deal.

Winners Of Yahoo Yodeling Contest Announced

About one month ago, Yahoo launched a new campaign to get people excited about its brand, and as part of the exercise, asked individuals to put their spin on the famous Yahoo yodel.  This afternoon, Yahoo identified the three people who stood out from the crowd.

Major Companies Endorse Legal Agreement For Open Standards

Sharing open source software just got a whole lot easier.  The Open Web Foundation has announced the availability of the Open Web Foundation Agreement, and some huge corporations - namely Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo - have given the arrangement their figurative seal of approval.

Yahoo Launches Comedy Clip Show

Yahoo has launched a new original online series sponsored by ConAgra Foods, called "What's So Funny?" "What's So Funny?" features daily three-minute clips with hosts Mike Bachmann and Shira Lazar, which recap the funniest moments from the previous night's prime time lineup. Viewers can vote on the funniest moments of the week, helping to decide the content for a weekend episode recapping the week's most humorous moments. Each episode will include a 30 to 60-second ad that features a ConAgra Foods brand.

Who Owns Your Content?

Have you ever wondered what would happen to your content on third-party sites if those sites ceased to exist? You may own your content on them as it stands now, but what if they went away?  Would you be ok if your tweets or your status updates disappeared? Discuss here.

Yahoo Hires Editor For Homepage News

It looks like Yahoo is quite serious about using its homepage to display news that people actually want to see.  Rather than assign someone to tinker with algorithms, the company's hired a 25-year veteran of the news industry to assemble a team of editors.