Yahoo! Messenger 10 beta

Nifty New Insider

Yahoo! Messenger 10 beta (windows download) was released yesterday. It is a major milestone for the instant messaging team, and for me in particular because it means the new insider page is now live! This is the project I have been working on for the past few months. It is essentially a mini version of the Yahoo! homepage built with YQL cloud technology, complete with mail, news, weather, search assist, a high-revenue ad position, alternate stylesheets (skins!), a location picker, and there’s even an easter egg or two. Go find them if you can. ;)

The page is intended to run “inside the IM client” but it works just fine in any modern browser window, too. Check it out here (you will need a Yahoo! id).

Moving back to Austin

route from CA to TX

We have decided to move back to Austin, TX. Our appartement lease is up, all the stuff is in boxes, and I’m getting ready for the transition from too much Sushi to too much Mexican food.

I’ll still be working (remotely) for Yahoo!.

The dot in the middle of the map is Roswell, NM – where we will obviously stop for some dorky tourist trap. For realtime updates during the roadtrip follow the Twitter.

Bloodbath Redux

I was not laid off today, but another set of co-workers were, including my immediate counterpart. Bits Blog (NYTimes.com) thinks that the Yahoo Layoffs Today May Not Be Last

Yahoo began laying off 1,500 workers on Wednesday as part of a plan, announced in October, to slash expenses by $400 million a year. The cost cutting, however, may have to go deeper in the coming year.

“There could be additional staff reductions next year,” said Brad Williams, a Yahoo spokesman. “It depends on the decisions we make about prioritization, and on things we can’t predict in the economy.” Mr. Williams added: “We are trying to instill a culture of cost-discipline in our business.” [He] also said that the job cuts today will affect most parts of the company, but that Yahoo executives are still evaluating which projects will be de-emphasized or cut altogether. “This is more of a cost reduction rather than business prioritization,” he said about the layoffs. “Business prioritization will continue going forward. We are looking at businesses we may put into maintenance mode.”

Yahoo’s chief executive, Jerry Yang, penned a farewell note to laid-off employees on the company’s blog. If you want to know how managers are supposed to notify employees whose jobs are being cut, check out Valleywag.

Sad day.

Yahoo! CEO Plans to Step Down

Yahoo! said Monday evening that Jerry Yang, its chief executive, would step down from that role after the company finds a replacement.

Mr. Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo!, assumed control of the company a year and a half ago from Terry Semel, a Hollywood studio boss that he hand-picked for the job. His tenure has been a tumultuous period during which Yahoo! rejected a $47.5 billion takeover offer from Microsoft and failed to cement an advertising partnership with Google.

Shiny New Profiles

Y! logo

Yahoo begins the rollout of its new user profile today, which marks the first tangible product release for the social part of the Yahoo Open Strategy, or YOS. The profile is one of the anchors (mail is the other) to Yahoo’s strategy of turning the site into one big social network.

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…and, it doesnt work with my id at this point, some bug causes it to show in chinese. great!