Yahoo intends to focus on delivering the answer directly to the user, rather than supplying a list of links which the user then has to click on. Rich search results and answers instantly appear in the extended query box. Yahoo has combined search results with popular content in order to provide these answers.

Search Direct will predict your search with every keystroke entered into the search box and offers immediate results for these types of searches:

• Trending Search Topics — Showing the most popular searches related to what the user has typed.
• Direct Answers — For common searches such as addresses, shopping, weather forecasts, stock information and movie showtimes.
• Search Previews — For the ten most popular search results.
• Rich Content — For the top sports and news results related to the search.
• Direct Results — Allowing the user to go directly to the page, rather than viewing all the search results.

Yahoo Search Direct is available now.

Source: Search Engine Land

In December 2009, Yahoo Mail was integrated with Facebook. These days, if you’re a Yahoo user, you’ll discover connections to Facebook all throughout Yahoo. This goes beyond simple share buttons. You can now import all of your Facebook contact information and birthdays into your Yahoo contacts list, you can update your status from your Yahoo status box, and you can even import your profile picture from Facebook.

In this article, I’m going to show you the four areas of Yahoo where you’ll notice the clearest integration with Facebook and how you can make use of those connections.

Accessing Facebook From Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail was the very first area of Yahoo that become integrated with your Facebook account. You can be certain the purpose for doing this was so that Yahoo users could import all of their Facebook contacts into their Yahoo contact list.

The first thing you’ll notice once you’ve signed into your Facebook account from Yahoo, is that when you access your Ymail main page, the center pane shows all of the latest status updates from both Yahoo and Facebook.

The display defaults to use both, but if you want, you can click on the Facebook tab and only see all of your friends Facebook status updates. By default, your Yahoo and Facebook contact lists are separate. Yahoo apparently respects your privacy enough not to automatically import all of your Facebook contact details into your Yahoo contact list. However, you can do this by clicking on “Contacts” inside Yahoo Mail.

Clicking on “Get Started” will walk you through the process of bringing in all of the data from your Facebook contacts and integrating them into your Yahoo contact list. Once you’ve “plugged in” your Facebook account, your contact information on Yahoo will remain updated with all of the latest contact information.

Another cool integration between Facebook and Yahoo Mail is that whenever you receive an email message from a contact that Yahoo recognizes as one of your Facebook friends, you’ll see a little “F” Facebook icon on the corner of their profile image.

If you click that icon, it’ll whisk you immediately to that person’s Facebook page.

Other Yahoo Integration With Facebook

Since December 2009, Yahoo has been hard at work integrating Facebook features into the rest of the website as well. So long as you’ve enabled the Facebook connection with your Yahoo account, you’ll discover Facebook access almost anywhere.

One very convenient integration I noticed was from the main Yahoo page. So long as you’re logged in, under “My Favorites” you’ll find “Facebook” listed. If you click on the “Quickview” link, a minimized view of Facebook pops up within your main Yahoo page.

The coolest thing about this is that you can immediately check out your Facebook page straight from your Yahoo main page, without going to a different website or opening a new window. The quickview screen works just as though you’re at the Facebook site itself. Click on any of the tabs at the top and the content will change within the quickview screen.

Now, if you’ve ever used any of the social network desktop or online apps that integrate all of your social networks like Seesmic or Digsby, you’ll see that Yahoo is actually attempting to accomplish the same goal. If you click on the “Have something to share?” link on your main Yahoo page, you’ll see that under the dropdown box, you can choose to distribute your status update to your Facebook account by selecting the box.

You’ll see this especially when you visit Yahoo Pulse. Here, it’s pretty obvious that Yahoo is really trying to become the central hub where Yahoo users access all of their social networks. In fact the Yahoo Pulse page mirrors the Facebook layout in a lot of ways, with the status update at the top, friend updates from your various networks in the center, and even friend connections and “applications” on the right, just like in Facebook.

As you can see from the screenshot above, Yahoo also offers the ability to plug into your Twitter account so you can send and receive updates from your Yahoo account as well.

Yahoo Pulse is also where you’ll go into your profile to extract your Facebook photo for use as your Yahoo avatar. Finally – no more silly cartoon character for a profile!

Are you a Yahoo user, and if so, do you know of any other ways that Facebook is integrated into Yahoo? What do you think about the integration? Share your insight and thoughts in the comments section below.

Being able to make video calls is a welcomed addition to an already popular application on iOS devices, and is especially useful if you’re looking for a quick way to connect with friends visually. In this article, I will go over all the new features associated with this application.

Making Calls with Yahoo! Messenger 2.0

We’ll start with the most important update to the application–making calls. With this app, you can now make both video and voice calls to your Yahoo! Messenger friends. Calls can be made to either iOS to iOS, iOS to PC or iOS to Android devices.

To make video calls and stream live video one-to-one, it is preferable to have an iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4, iOS 4.1 and WiFi connection.

Voice calls are also free to your Messenger friends, but you are also able to make low cost voice calls to landlines and mobile phones, as well as low cost international calls with a Yahoo! Voice Phone Out account. This feature is available in the following markets: US, France, Germany, Spain and Singapore.

Multitasking

Another new feature incorporated into the app is multitasking. Quite simply, what this allows you to do is work with your other iPhone apps while Yahoo! Messenger runs in the background. This feature is available for iPhone 3GS/4 users running iOS 4.1.

Multitasking is a huge addition to this app if you ask me. It allows you to do other things while waiting for a response to the people you’ve messaged, and also gives you the opportunity to access your other files in the middle of a conversation. No more “I’ll check and get back to you later.”

What Else Can You Do with This App?

Now that we’ve tackled the major updates, lets look at some of the other features that make this a useful application for your phone. You can still use the Yahoo! Messenger app to send free SMS messages to your friends, although they may be charged a fee depending on their carrier’s policies.

Also, get notified for every message you receive with push notification support. Now you can know when a new message arrives regardless of whether the app is running, in the background, or even if it’s not open.

You can bring your friends into one place by adding your Windows Live Messenger contacts to your buddy list, and capture and share iPhone photos and video with them in real-time, as well as all of your Yahoo! Messenger buddies.

And in case you were wondering, the app’s performance has been enhanced, offering a “simpler, faster, richer Yahoo! Messenger experience at your fingertips.” Rich text and personal expressions–like emoticons and avatars–are also in play.

Conclusion

If you use Yahoo! Messenger to keep in touch with your friends and you also own an iPhone or other iOS device, I see no reason why you shouldn’t take advantage of this app. With the new updates, Yahoo! offers a simple way to keep in touch with your friends and contact them via texting, calling by phone, and even video chat.

It’s also great to see that this app works across different platforms such as the PC and Android, so even if your buddies don’t have an iPhone the chances are good that you can still message them for free with this app.

Do you use Yahoo! Messenger to keep in touch with your friends? If not, will you be now that this update has come out? Leave your thoughts, ideas, and comments below!

If you don’t know what I mean, have a look at 15 funny Yahoo Answers questions from Yahoo users. How do these people manage to survive?

If you need to work out those face and belly muscles, here you go!

1. Question: How Can I Prevent Pearl Harbor From Happening?

Smartass Answer: You need a Delorean, a Flux-capacitor and 1.21 Gigawatts of electricity to make that happen.

2. Question: Credit Card (Stuck) In Computer?

Smartass Answer: Turn the computer upside down and shake it.

3. Question: If You Die, What Happens To Your MySpace?

Smartass Answer: It deletes itself. You see when you die a little microchip goes off in your brain and instantly deactivates any accounts you may have. They are inserted a few months after birth, everyone has them.

This was also the best answer chosen by the asker herself!

4. Question: Why Do Stupid People Breed?

Smartass Answer: They wanted company?

5. Question: If A Woman Was To Eat A Lot Of Chocolate, Would Her Breast Milk Taste Like Chocolate Milk?

Smartass Answer: Chocolate breast milk comes from black women.

This was also the best answer chosen by the asker. His comment?

wow never realised this b4, ty

6. Question: How Turn Computer Monitor Into Mirror?

Smartass Answer: Get a can of mirror spray paint, point, and spray.

7. Question: How To Get YouTube To Come Film You?

Smartass Answer: facepalm

This is actually a popular troll question, that has been posted several times on Yahoo! Answers. Meanwhile, the original question was deleted.

8. Question: Why Are Fossilized Clam Shells Found On Mt. Everest?

Smartass Answer: Obviously. Any other suggestion, such as geological uplift of the ancient seabed at points of tectonic plate subduction, would be mere hocus-pocus and superstition.

9. Question: What Is The Country Of Canada All About?

Smartass Answer: Wow, the American education system really is in crisis.

10. Question: Instead Of Simply Worshipping ‘God’, Why Not Worship Godzilla?

Smartass Answer: I choose to worship God because I prefer worshiping real things over movie characters anytime.

This question reminds of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. As founder Bobby Henderson says:

With millions, if not thousands, of devout worshippers, the Church of the FSM is widely considered a legitimate religion, even by its opponents””mostly fundamentalist Christians, who have accepted that our God has larger balls than theirs.

11. Question: How Do People Hide Large Amounts Of Food In Their Mouth?

Smartass Answer: It’s called Bulimia?

12. Question: Can I Fail A Drug Test By Having Sex The Night Before?

Smartass Answer: You will fail an IQ test.

13. Question: Why Doesn’t The Earth Fall Down?

Smartass Answer: Because it can fly.

Yes, that’s also the best answer selected by the Asker. She didn’t care much for gravity and the sun.

14. Question: Why Did Yahoo! Answers Delete My Question?

Subtitle: Would my cat like the heat from about 15 seconds in the microwave?

Smartass Answer: Try the dryer instead.

15. Question: VERY POPULAR Techno Song?? HELP!!! They Play It In Clubs!!?

Smartass Answer: Sandstorm by Darude.

I’m speechless. People actually knew the answer!

If those got you hooked, check out more funny Yahoo! Answers on these pages:

• Funny Yahoo Questions
• Funny Yahoo Answers
• Yahoo Laughs

Do you think most of these questions are genuine or do people just fake it to appear in an article like this?

Recently, I wrote a review of RSS Bandit, a very cool feed reader with the ability to pull in email feeds from Gmail accounts. It doesn’t use POP access, instead it utilizes the authenticated Atom feed that Google provides to all Gmail users. This is awesome, but once again it made me regret ever signing up for a free Yahoo account, because it’s once again left out in the cold. No matter what, I always have to go back to the online Yahoo email system to check those emails. In a Web 2.0 world, Yahoo Mail feels so disconnected from everything.

After writing the RSS Bandit article, I realized that if there’s some way I could convert my free Yahoo email account into an RSS feed, I’d have an instant connection to that free email account without the need for a POP connection. It actually didn’t take very long to discover YmailFeed, an awesome free service hosted on Google AppSpot (ironically) that lets you convert your free Yahoo email account into an RSS feed.

Setting Up Your Yahoo Email RSS Feed

The first thing you’ll need to do to set up your Yahoo Mail as an RSS feed is to visit YmailFeed, sign up for your free account, and then click on “Start the Process“.

You’re then taken to your Yahoo account sign-in page. This is a legitimate Yahoo sign-in, it’s not a scam! YmailFeed is not collecting your login information, you simply need to log into your account so that the YmailFeed system can retrieve a unique key associated with your authentication.

This is similar to when you give external applications permission to access your Facebook account. Likewise, by logging into your Yahoo account, you are “approving” that YmailFeed can access your incoming email. To hammer this home, Yahoo requires that you sign off on this request, since you’re basically opening up your email account to a third-party app that is going to convert your incoming mail into a feed format.

Once you agree, your account is active and all new, unread email is converted into a feed. You can see a preview of that feed in the left window in your YmailFeed account. You have three important links at the bottom of the next screen, which is basically the feed for your free Yahoo email account. If that URL is ever compromised and falls into the wrong hands, just click on “Regenerate the Codes” and a new set of feed URLs is provided – the old ones will be disabled.

Three types of feeds links are provided, AutoDiscovery, a standard RSS Feed and an ATOM feed. Now that I’m using RSS Bandit, which can handle AutoDiscovery, I just initiate a new feed and add the feed under my existing email group. The feed shows up under “Feed Details” just like any other regular RSS feed.

The way RSS Bandit handles it when you click on the email itself is that it opens up a direct link to Yahoo Mail within the lower content panel. Another cool way to make use of your Yahoo feed is by clicking that little “Netvibes” link on the YmailFeed page with your feed URLs. In just two clicks, you can add an awesome Yahoo mail widget to your Netvibes account.

Getting Yahoo Mail loaded into my private Netvibes dashboard is something that I haven’t been able to get working for a long time, but now with YmailFeed, it works like a charm.

If you just want to get your most recent Yahoo mail in Google Reader, simply add the RSS Feed from your YmailFeed account and you’ve instantly connected Google Reader to your Yahoo inbox. Now, how cool is that?

In fact, having your free Yahoo inbox as an RSS feed like this opens up a whole world of possibilities. You could install the GreatNews RSS Filter and use it to analyze all incoming Gmail and Yahoo email and send you alerts. Rather than setting up filters in all of your email accounts, you can process all incoming email in one place.

Can you think of other cool ways you can make use of your Yahoo email RSS feed? Share your ideas and insight in the comments section below!

This is why, for all the people who said “Good Riddance” when Yahoo shut down Geocities, the Internet was really worse off for the closure. A tremendous amount of information on a variety of topics was ripped from the web overnight.

Or it would have been, if not for mirror project Reocities. This site backed up as much as they could possibly manage, and are accepting further contributions from anyone who might have small pieces backed up.

What It Is

Of course, an undertaking this massive is going to be with a few faults. Not every site ever hosted on the page is here, but a good chunk are. How does one use it?

This is perhaps the real brilliance of the page. Reocities is only one letter off from Geocities, and the URLs from Geocities are maintained. What this means is that any site unopenable in Geocities can usually be opened by simply replacing the “G” in the URL with an “R”. If the mirror has the site, you’ll have access to it.

If doing this seems too much a pain in the neck, don’t worry: it can happen automatically. There’s a Greasemonkey script capable of doing it automatically; find it here.

It’s also worth noting that most of the spam pages Geocities was famous for are nowhere to be found. This is because Reocities, as a project, aimed to only grab sites that are worth keeping. Naturally some crack made it through the cracks, but it’s pretty astounding how well the filter seems to have worked.

Finally, if you’re not sure what you’re looking for, I recommend checking out the the neighborhood page as a decent starting point. This is the top-level domain of Reocities, and it’s possible to stumble upon some interesting stuff in here.

A Brief History

Reocities is essentially a feat pulled off by one nerd with a bunch of really nice equipment and a total lack of sleep. You can read the entire tale here, and I highly suggest you do: it’s quite entertaining and very interesting.

Dutchman jmattheij wrote the scripts that scoured the site that made the bulk of the backup, and also maintained the server cluster that did the job. This has since been supplemented with contributions from The Internet Archive and individual users who backed up a few of the pages that disapeared. The result is a fairly complete backup of Geocities that is still growing.

If you find a former page for yours is missing, and you have the files that make it up backed up on your computer, you should contact jmattheij and send this data to him; he’ll make it part of Reocities as quickly as possible.

Conclusion

Many early movies are forever lost to history, because the film was recycled to recover valuable silver. Yahoo shutting down Geocities is similar to me: destroying a piece of history in order to save some money. Unlike these early films, however, vintage Internet is being preserved. That this is even possible is a testament to the power of the web.

What do you think? Is Reocities a worthwhile project, or should Geocities be forever forgotten as a wasteland of useless content? Are you happy the content is somewhere? Can you see yourself using this service? Share in the comments below. Also feel free to share the best Reocities links you can find; I’d love to read some of your favorites!