Bing and Dogpile have special logos and imagery for the celebratory day.

Here is Bing’s special dragon theme for Mardi Gras:

DogPile gets a bit more festive:

I also posted a theme at the Search Engine Roundtable:

I should add that Yahoo also has an animated logo for International Women’s Day. Here it is:

Yahoo would not comment on the new system, but the purpose behind it is to help Yahoo better track users around the web, so they can offer more tailored ads and offer advertisers better ad targeting options.

Y Connect allows users to register and log into web sites by clicking on a Yahoo button. After the user logs in, their activity on the web site can be shared with Yahoo. This shared data can be used for advertising purposes or to make Yahoo’s products better.

I do find it funny that this news came out slightly ahead of the major Facebook privacy breach the Wall Street Journal uncovered. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.

Facebook responded basically saying it was a mistake and the press have “exaggerated” the issue but there was an issue:

Recently, it has come to our attention that several applications built on Facebook Platform were passing the User ID (UID), an identifier that we use within our APIs, in a manner that violated this policy. In most cases, developers did not intend to pass this information, but did so because of the technical details of how browsers work.

There is tons of coverage on the Facebook Privacy breach on Techmeme.

It’s noteworthy because Yahoo has shut down its offices over the holidays as a cost-cutting measure. But paying for luggage at two busy airports on one of the busiest travel days of the year? That should cost Yahoo a nice, little chunk of change.

Yahoo, Bing, and Google have also been trying to earn goodwill with free WiFi in select locations on a temporary basis. Tis the season to bribe users for their loyalty!

Postscript: Yahoo didn’t tell us the cost of this effort today, but they did clarify how it’s working. A spokesperson called it a “spontaneous effort” that involved Yahoo employees paying the luggage fees of San Jose travelers using the American Airlines ticket counter this morning “because they had flights at the time we were at the airport, and passengers were checking in.” This afternoon, Yahoo employees are at SFO but the spokesperson doesn’t know what airline(s) they’re working with.

On the whole I’d have to say the earlier Steele speech was unimpressive and too familiar sounding. Maybe it’s because they’ve been previewing the messaging informally for some time. And maybe because the themes and creative of the new campaign — though impressively polished — are much like the old and unsuccessful “Life Engine” campaign of 2004. But there were also too many cliches and platitudes in the speech and it was delivered without convincing passion. The word “passion” was used repeatedly but not equally evident from the podium or in the audience as Steele spoke to a largely unresponsive group of advertisers and agencies.

One of the major themes of the talk and new campaign is that Yahoo will help you “navigate life.” Steele rejected the distinction between online and offline: “the Web and your world are inseparable.” In parallel there was a discussion of Yahoo’s reach across the three screens: PC, mobile and TV accordingly. There was a lot of emphasis on communications but also on the new Yahoo homepage as evidence of this new personalized approach — a dashboard of sorts to help organize the internet.

I’m sure there have been numerous consumer focus groups leading up to the new campaign. And while many people would argue the $100 million (or more) would be better spent on engineers, I’m not going to deny that advertising helps shape perceptions. Yahoo’s got a stronger and “friendlier” consumer brand than AOL, Microsoft and maybe even Google at this point. So the campaign dollars may be well spent in maintaining that image.

Apple spends hugely on advertising and marketing to support a brand perception in the market, at a company level and on the level of specific products. However Apple’s products deliver and fulfill the messaging. Here that’s not the case to the same degree.

The challenge and the problem is that Yahoo sites and services must actually fulfill the promise of helping people organize and navigate all the information out there. People are overwhelmed by information overload and “the paradox of choice.” They do need trusted sources, they do need simplification, they do need assistance. But I’m not sure that Yahoo delivers as promised.

Yahoo has lots of reach and lots of top traffic destinations: news, sports, mail, finance, etc. But Yahoo needs to actually create best of class tools and it needs to find simple ways to help consumers integrate all the information coming at them. The homepage is a good start, but it’s not enough. Search Pad is useful but not the “kick ass” product it needs to be to really set Yahoo apart.

There is a disconnect between right-sounding rhetoric and the reality of Yahoo today. I hope that the company can close the gap and be the personalized destination that it aspires to be.

Yahoo is planning to reintroduce its battered brand to the public Tuesday with a massive global marketing campaign, according to people familiar with the effort.

The Internet company’s new tagline, according to one of those people: “It’s You!”

The Y in the “You” is the Y from “Yahoo,” and the famous Yahoo exclamation point will pop up too, this person said . . . The global campaign is focused on personalization and how Yahoo can help people navigate all their services and information online.

In the past, Yahoo has run numerous ad campaigns promoting individual services or the company as a whole. The “It’s You!” campaign sounds quite similar to 2004′s “Life Engine” campaign. At the time the press release announcing the latter effort said:

“Our goal is to showcase the multi-dimensional nature of our brand and reinforce how Yahoo! impacts the lives of its users every single day,” said Cammie Dunaway, chief marketing officer, Yahoo!. “One great way to express the idea of consumer impact is to hear it directly from and feature those people who use our ‘Life Engine’ every day.”

I don’t think I’d agree with the WSJ characterization that Yahoo’s brand is “battered,” but it’s not as hip/cool/lustrous as it once was. AOL faces the nearly identical challenge. Facebook, although not a portal, has taken the place of these portals for many people.

There’s always a question about whether advertising can change behavior. Certainly it can generate awareness. But Yahoo’s past efforts to promote its search engine failed to affect market share. The same was true with Ask’s commercials as well. Still there may be an opportunity to reintroduce the Yahoo brand as a way to help organize your life online.

If I were in the CMO role now occupied by Elisa Steele I would also emphasize Yahoo as a trusted source of information. The internet is increasingly noisy and chaotic and there are only a few sites that truly can lay claim to being trustworthy. Yahoo is one of them.

A Portuguese version of Yahoo Meme was launched earlier this year, and Yahoo followed that up with a Spanish version last month (see Yahoo’s Social Plan: Twitter, Twitter, & More Twitter?). The bottom of the English-language home page has a drop-down menu to switch to either of those versions. The service is described as being similar to Twitter with its short posts, the ability to repost messages from other users, and the ability to share photos and video.

Yahoo has been very quiet overall about Meme and what it has in store for the service. We have an email in to Yahoo asking for more details. We’ll update this post if and when we learn more.

Postscript: Yahoo shared this statement with us about Yahoo Meme: “Yahoo! is experimenting with an invitation-only communications tool in select languages and markets for people who want to quickly and easily share interesting content, including multi-media. Global product innovation is important to Yahoo! and we continuously test various products and services in many local markets to gain valuable feedback and insights from consumers. We will share additional details about this product if and when we launch it publicly.”

(found via TechCrunch)

Here’s the relevant verbatim Bartz quote from the earnings call transcript:

We also know that local relevance of both content and advertising is increasingly important to our users and capturing more of the local ad market is a big focus to us. To this end, we have announced today that we have expanded our relationship with AT&T to include the reselling of Yahoo! display ad inventory by AT&T’s advertising sales force. Grouped with our strategic newspaper consortium partnership we now have a local sales force 13,000 reps strong. These relationships extend our reach into the fast growing local online advertiser segment.

Given all that it was a surprise to me to see a report on peHUB asserting that Yahoo was seeking a buyer for both HotJobs and Yahoo Small Business:

Now, peHUB has learned from multiple sources that as part of Bartz’s drive to dismantle non-core assets, Yahoo is also trying to shed both HotJobs, which Yahoo acquired for $436 million in cash and stock back in 2001, and Yahoo Small Business, which helps customers get their small businesses online by providing them with everything from domain registration to site monitoring to promotional tools.

On the subject of small business, beyond the remarks above, Bartz also highlighted the Yahoo-Bank of America small business answers center:

[L]arge advertisers such as Bank of America come to us because of our leading sites and large reach. We are partnering with B of A to promote its small business answer center. The center is integrated with our popular social assets such as Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Group to capture user engagement. It is promoted across our network through related search and display ads.

Yahoo Small Business is one of the biggest — if not the biggest — webhosting entities in the SMB market. I don’t know its precise economics, but it generates fees revenue and also serves as a marketing channel to the SMB marketplace:

In addition, Yahoo recently launched a partnership with AdReady that allows SMBs to create self-service display ads that run on the Yahoo network. This doesn’t seem like a company ready to abandon its small business assets as “non-core.” Still it could be true.

I’ve always believed that Yahoo has not fully exploited Small Business as a channel and maybe they want to be out of the hosting and domain registration business. Perhaps the company feels that others are better suited to sell and create the ads that will simply run on the Yahoo network and through the APT platform.

I might be more inclined to believe that HotJobs is for sale. However HotJobs was the basis and cornerstone for the newspaper consortium that Yahoo regards as strategic. That consortium has now moved well beyond HotJobs, but recruitment remains one of three relatively large (though declining) classifieds categories for newspapers. It would certainly raise lots of eyebrows among consortium newspaper execs if the HotJobs property were sold.

Yahoo is trying to control expenses, shed groups and properties that are not strategic and invest where the most value is to be found. However, given Bartz’s remarks about the importance of local and small business advertising and its newspaper consortium, it’s very strange that Yahoo would be selling these two properties.

The new tools include:

• Integration with Delicious content – end-users can get Delicious saves, top tags, and count information within their search results
• Advanced language capabilities – developers can now filter specific language results for a given market. BOSS now supports Czech, Hungarian, and traditional Chinese
• New sorting functionality – BOSS News service can now sort by date and/or a specified time range in days, weeks, or hours

Yahoo’s announcement has more information about all three tools, including a few code examples.

The Yahoo widgets are Internet-based applications that can be used on Internet-connected TVs and controlled with the TV’s remote control. Samsung has just introduced a TV that integrates the Yahoo Widget Engine; Sony, LG Electronics, and Vizio will soon launch TVs that support it, too.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the initial version of YWE will be preloaded with widgets for Flickr, Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather, and Yahoo Finance. Additional widgets — like Twitter, USA Today Sports, and sudoku — will be available in a widget gallery.

But despite Yahoo’s need to gain search market share, there’s no Yahoo Search widget. Yahoo spokesperson Lucas Mast tells me that “there will be updates and iterations over time and search is one of the items that will be under consideration.”

The WSJ article says Yahoo expects to offer about 100 widgets by the end of the year.

Below is a photo of the Flickr widget as seen in the WSJ article. Read the article for additional images and video.

In her first conference call back in January, new CEO Carol Bartz said “everything’s open for examination” when it comes to streamlining operations and improving the bottom line.

Yahoo gave this statement to Search Engine Land:

“After careful consideration, Yahoo! is discontinuing FareChase, a travel metasearch engine, effective March 25, 2009. After this date, users will no longer have access to FareChase to compare travel prices, but can continue to shop for and book flights, hotels, cars, cruises and vacation packages through Yahoo! Travel and its partners.

“Yahoo! continues to align resources to focus on core strategic priorities and deliver superior user experiences on the Internet. Discontinuing FareChase will allow Yahoo! to focus our efforts on other key features for Yahoo! Travel, such as Yahoo! Travel Guides and Yahoo! Trip Planner.”

Yahoo bought FareChase in 2004, and in recent years had taken noticeable steps to give the service more exposure. They added it to the Yahoo Travel home page in early 2008, and even featured it as a the travel shortcut in Yahoo’s main search results: