It's been a number of months (if not longer) since Yahoo showed any love to its Upcoming events service. Since acquiring the service in October 2005, the service has seen just one re-design - and few additional features since. However, in a largely-uncovered announcement earlier in the week, Upcoming now offers a new Jumpstart feature that scans your Pandora, last.fm and iTunes libraries and then follows your favourite artists on the service - alerting you to forthcoming gigs listed on Upcoming.

Whilst other services, including last.fm, allow you to easily view your favourite artists, it's an interesting addition to the Upcoming service - and hopefully means that Yahoo are now looking at ways to build on a largely unloved product.

Yahoo! Go was an early mobile content service that started in 2006. It seems quaint by today's standards, though, which explains why Yahoo!'s shutting it down. With a mobile site that's available on pretty much any phone, plus a few different iPhone apps, Yahoo! simply has no reason to keep working on Go.

Go hasn't been updated in the past year, so current users probably saw this coming (or already have newer phones).

The official date on the headstone for Yahoo! Go is January 12, 2010. In the meantime, the team working on Go has been reassigned to improving Yahoo!'s mobile site. Other Yahoo! mobile properties include iPhone apps for Flickr and Yahoo! Finance.

[via TechCrunch]

It seems like just yesterday that Yahoo! Messenger 10 entered beta, showing off new video chat and social networking features. Now it's all grown up, out of beta, and replacing Y! Messenger 9 as the default version on Yahoo's download page. Folks upgrading to version 10 get the benefit of several nice new features, including video calling and integration of streams from social sites.

Yahoo! has made some big improvements to its webcam feature, adding better video quality, synched audio and a full-screen mode. You can also move your video call windows around and place them side-by-side. It also supports video effects. To make video calls, both sides need to be on Yahoo! Messenger 10.

The other big addition is a social streaming view called Y! Updates, which lets you see your contacts' updates from several social sites, including Twitter, Last.fm, and Yahoo!'s own Buzz. Of course, it also shows your friends' Messenger status messages. However, CNET suggests you do a custom install of Yahoo! Messenger 10 rather than the default installation, so you have more control over toolbars and other additional junk that comes with Messenger.

Every now and then I find myself working on slides in Keynote and writing Download Squad posts - and struggling to find a suitable image. Of course, Flickr is the best way to find images - their clear licencing and Creative Commons support makes finding images fairly straight forward. However, getting the image into Keynote isn't entirely painless. The workflow of browsing search results, viewing the image and then finding it at a suitable size (if it exists) takes time - however that's where Viewfinder steps in.

A native Mac OS X application (requiring Mac OS X Snow Leopard), Viewfinder allows you to search Flickr from the desktop apply filters to show only Creative Commons images, and specify a particular image size. Then, once you select an image you can download the image, set it as your desktop background - and most importantly - send images straight to Keynote for your slides.

If you're a heavy keynote user (or blogger) who frequently needs to find Flickr images for your work Viewfinder is indispensible. I've been testing it since early September and found it an incredibly convenient tool to have at hand. A licence costs £15 (roughly $25) and a free demo is available for you try from the Viewfinder webpage.

We've known for months that early-90's homepage service GeoCities was shutting down today, taking a big chunk of Internet history and a lot of hideous animated GIFs with it. That doesn't stop the web geeks at Download Squad from getting a little sentimental, though.

To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi: we felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

So, let's take a moment to remember GeoCities. The easy website-creation service opened in 1995, and many Internet users set up their first homepages within its quirky "neighborhoods". Back before everyone had a .com, GeoCities sported long, convoluted URLs with directories like SiliconValley/Pines or SunsetStrip/Towers. In 1999, GeoCities was purchased by Yahoo!, and has been a Yahoo! property ever since.

Although GeoCities sites are all disappearing from Yahoo!'s servers today, you can still take a trip down memory lane. Archive.org has started a Special Collection to catalog the sites. The effort was supported by Archive Team and includes a collection of those ever-present "Under Construction" GIFs from the heydey of GeoCities.

Popular geek-centric webcomic XKCD paid its own tribute to GeoCities today, reskinning the site to look like a stereotypical homepage, circa 1996.

At long last, after what seems like an eternity compared to the usually-rapid pace that most social networks evolve at, Flickr has implemented people-tagging. The functionality that most consider a defining characteristic of Facebook is now available on Flickr.

We've all been there: waking up on a Saturday morning, rolling out of bed, last night's drunkenly-debauched memories slowly swimming back into focus through your rheumy, sleep-encrusted eyes. You stagger into the kitchen or your study -- maybe there's a nice cup of coffee waiting for you. You sit down at your laptop -- or turn on your iPhone -- and check your mail.

There's the usual spam, the banal good-luck chain-letters and perhaps news that your copy of Windows 7 has just been dispatched. And then you see it.

'John Doe has tagged a photo of you on Facebook!'

Suddenly you find yourself plunged back into your memories of the night before. Desperately you poke and prod at the memory, praying the holiest damn prayer you've ever prayed, hoping that you didn't do something you'd later regret... something you'd later see on your computer screen... something your mother should never, ever see...

Quickly you un-tag yourself, cursing your friend, his family and his loved ones, praying you've done it quickly enough to avoid disaster.

And now ...? And now it can happen to you on both your social networks!

But wait! No! Flickr has gone one step further than Facebook! With Flickr you block people from tagging you in photos! With Flickr you can specify that only friends or family can tag you -- or no one at all!

The only real problem of course is that people don't often use Flickr for 'wild night out' photos -- that's usually reserved for Facebook. But would it be too crazy to suggest that Flickr could tie into the Facebook API and tag your Facebook friends on Flickr? Or will Facebook simply turn around and enable similar privacy options on tagging?

[via TechCrunch]

Xoopit is a service that turns Gmail into a powerful media browser, letting you quickly view your attachments. Since Yahoo! acquired it, though, it's been available to Yahoo! Mail users, and now Yahoo! is looking to make it exclusive. Xoopit will become the My Photos feature of Yahoo! Mail, and it's being pulled out of Gmail completely. Even the Firefox add-on and Facebook app for Gmail are being discontinued.

How does Yahoo! explain removing Xoopit from its biggest group of users? "We will not be able to keep investing in our Xoopit for Gmail product, and don't want you to end up with a lousy experience." That's going to leave a lot of Xoopit Gmail users disgruntled. Here's how this move affects you if you're one of them: your Xoopit data disappears on November 13th, but your attachments remain untouch (albeit unindexed) in your account. I don't know about other Xoopit users, but losing the service certainly doesn't make me want to sign up for an email address with the company that took it away. Bad form, Yahoo!

Yahoo's FireEagle project has long been a great (albeit under-used) service to let you share your location with other websites. Services such as Dopplr, Brightkite and many others can all update & read your location and use the service to display location-based data.

On the iPhone, there's plenty of free applications that update FireEagle such as yofe, but what if you're working on a desktop or laptop computer? That's where Clarke comes in handy -- a small, open-source utility for OS X that runs in your menu bar, it'll figure out where you are based on the Wi-Fi networks around you.

In earlier versions of Clarke, the updates were based on Skyhook Wireless' database -- the same used by the original iPhone to triangulate your location -- however the utility was recently updated for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and now uses the OS' built-in Core Location system to figure out where you are when run on the newest big-cat.

A free download, developers can also grab the source code over at Github, and the application also lets you easily view nearby data from Flickr, Google Maps, OpenStreetMap and Yahoo Maps.

Yahoo! is embarking on a new marketing campaign to convince users that the company's web services are all about "You." The mission is to reposition Yahoo! as a consumer-focused company. A few days ago, we mentioned that Yahoo!, for example, was unloading enterprise email service Zimbra and classifieds company HotJobs, which aren't really aligned with the new mission statement.

That said, if you look at the company's first TV spot for the campaign, you'd be hard pressed to tell exactly what that mission was. For about 55 seconds, Yahoo! clearly wants you to hear the word "you" a lot. And that ad is certainly dynamic, features vibrant colors, and locations from five different countries.

But you have to wait until the last few seconds of the ad to even find out what the company is... and there's absolutely nothing in the ad to explain how you'll be able to "consumer, share, buzz, destroy, earn, flirt, or watch." Of course, a TV spot that showed Yahoo! Messenger, Mail, Buzz, Video, or other web-services would be a heck of a lot less interesting.

What do you think? Is the new ad effective? If you haven't visited Yahoo! in a while, does it make you want to give the company another try?

Users who clicked on booby-trapped banner ads served by Google's DoubleClick and a Yahoo-owned service called Right Media ended up having their machines infected by a trojan, according to a report from The Register. The sneaky ads showed up on the Drudge Report, Lyrics.com, slacker.com and horoscope.com. Google says that publishers who use DoubleClick have to approve the banner ads that show up on their sites, implying that these four sites are at fault for the attack on their users.

The trojan itself was installed via an infected PDF file that opened and closed when a user clicked an ad. It's called Win32/Alureon, and it opens backdoor access to infected machines. This is serious business, and it's hardly the first time we've seen "malvertising," but who's to blame when it happens? Should site owners who buy ads have to scan them first, or should the big ad networks be responsible?

It seems like just two years ago that Yahoo! bought open source communication platform Zimbra for $350 million. Oh right, that's because it was. But today it looks like Yahoo! is looking to sell Zimbra, along with a number of other properties that don't fit the company's streamlined mission statement including HotJobs.

While Zimbra's advanced email tools certainly made their mark on the recently updated Yahoo! Mail web client, but Zimbra's real strength lies in the fact that you can deploy the software on your own server and create a corporate network for email, chat, and calendar sharing. And that's not necessarily a business Yahoo! wants to be in right now. Instead the company is focusing on its consumer oriented products.

Commencing noon EST today, online collaboration provider drop.io becomes Yahoo Mail's default 'Attach Large Files' provider. If you're wondering where you've heard drop.io mentioned before, drop.the company was recently featured on Time's list of the 50 best web apps of 2009.

Built on top of drop.io's open API, the change is a significant boost for the drop.io service, which up until now has provided users with free storage in the form of unlimited blocks of 100MB, as well as offering a premium service for enhanced features.

It's not clear at this time whether Yahoo! Mail attachments will also be limited to 100MB nor the extent of the integration between Yahoo! Mail and drop.io, but rest assured I'll update this post as more details surface.

If you're willing to give Yahoo Calendar 2.0 Beta a try, you can now sync your Yahoo Calendar with the Calendar app on your iPhone. It doesn't require a separate app download or anything like that, just a quick and painless setup procedure. This is actual over-the-air syncing, with no need for plugging in and syncing with iCal on your desktop, and it helps Yahoo catch up to Google Calendar as a viable alternative for iPhone users.

Just go to "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" in your iPhone's settings, Go to "add account," "other," and then pick "CalDav account." Enter "yahoo" as the server, and put in your Yahoo username and password. Save and quit, and the next time you open your iPhone Calendar app, you should be prompted to pick which Yahoo calendar layer you want to use. Be aware that doing this upgrades you to Yahoo Calendar 2.0 Beta, and you can't downgrade again afterward.

(via Lifehacker)

Delicious isn't the only Yahoo-owned service to get a makeover this week. Flickr also added some new search features, which should make it easier to browse the site and find what you're looking for. The layout of search results has changed, giving users the ability to resize thumbnails and click for more info without opening a photo page. The results also automatically resize to fit your browser window, which is good news for users with extremely large or extremely small displays.

There's also a new sidebar, displaying related groups, photographers, tag clusters and places. My new favorite addition, although it may seem like a small thing, is that Flickr now actually tells you which search results it's showing you. Refining searches under the old system wasn't very transparent, but now you know whether you're in someone's photostream or searching all of Flickr, whether you're searching for Creative Commons images or not, and more. All in all, the new search page is a big win for usability.

The popular social bookmarking service Delicious has been stagnating a bit since Yahoo purchased it, inspiring competition from the likes of Pinboard. Yahoo hasn't complete abandoned Delicious, though. An update today adds new search and sharing features and a "Fresh" tab that uses Twitter trends to find the most relevant links on Delicious.

Now, when you search on Delicious, you can specify a time frame to search, as well as sorting by tags. Previews from sites like YouTube, Flickr and Yelp should be showing up next to relevant bookmarks soon. On the sharing front, quick email and Twitter buttons have been added, so you can share in a couple of clicks, right from the link.