Yahoo today rolled out a new series of Facebook integrations across various Yahoo services including the companies homepage and Yahoo Mail service.  The announcement moves the company one step closer to being a major playing in the social networking aggregation field. The search portal also announced a fresh new look for Yahoo Pulse profiles, although the changes at Pulse.yahoo.com have yet to be made live.

In a Press Release, Cody Simms, Yahoo’s senior director of Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network Guru said that Yahoo has made their recent changes in an attempt to ensure Yahoo is:

“uniquely positioned to provide people with all of the mainstream methods of content discovery – social, search, communications, and editorial,”

The statement comes at a time when Yahoo is desperately in need of a focus for the companies properties, focus that has recently emerged as they have worked to gain momentum in the social networking field, signing a 5 year deal with Zynga (makers of Facebook favorites Farmville and Mafia Wars) and announcing various other partnerships.

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Six Apart (the company behind Typepad, Movabletype, and Vox) has dipped its toe in the green movement by purchasing an environmentally conscious network by the name of NaturalPath Media.

Six Apart, the world’s leading blogging and conversational media company, today announced the acquisition of NaturalPath Media, the largest online advertising and media network for sustainable, healthy, and conscious lifestyles. [...]

“NaturalPath Media is a valuable addition to the Six Apart Media network and strengthens our ability to help marketers reach highly influential green and healthy living consumers while they are engaging with content and conversations that are important to them,” said Chris Alden, CEO and Chairman of Six Apart. (MarketWire.com) read more

Posterous (considered by some to be Tumblr’s biggest rival) is finally allowing users to create pages to accompany their blogs.

Unlike Tumblr however, Posterous is enabling fans of the service to add a few extra features to pages that may appeal to keep-it-simple bloggers, not to mention spammers as well.

We decided to use the same great editor that you are already using for posts. This means you can edit rich text, upload any media, and add and edit photo galleries. All of the cool features that we’ve created for posts—like link auto-expansion and syntax highlighting—come along for the ride with pages. [...]

We allow you to create a page that redirects to a static URL. You may want to do this if you want to add a link to one of your social networks, or to a page tTo [sic] do this, simply click on the “Page Options” tab, and add a URL where it says “Redirect to:”. When your visitors click on a link to a redirect page, they will be redirected to the URL you specified. (Official Posterous Blog) read more

It looks like iPhone lovers who adhere to the faith of WordPress will have yet another reason to be jealous of their Blackberry friends.

The long coveted formatting bar which first appeared in the WordPress Android app is now making its way over to the Blackberry cult, making this author realize that he bought the wrong smartphone.

We have released a development snapshot of the app that includes an HTML formatting bar and minor changes on the UI front.

The formatting bar allows you to italicize, and embolden text, makes easy HTTP links and lists, without having to manually type in the coding. [...]

Furthermore, we have introduced an HTML code assistant that make inserting html faster than ever. just [sic] type the angular bracket and a popup for tag selection is shown on the screen. This is an experimental feature, we could remove it in the next dev release. (WordPress for Blackberry Dev Blog) read more

The New York Times on Friday revealed “The Scoop” a free iPhone app that allows users in New York City and Brooklyn to discover those areas.

The software according to the Apple App Store is:

“a guide to New York City from the staff of The New York Times… We offer lists of our favorite restaurants, bars, events and experiences. You go out and have fun. Check off the places you’ve been, and share what you’ve done with your friends.”

Users will find cool info that includes the top 50 restaurant picks from the news sources critics, a list of favorite bars, weekly events selected by the NYT team and other city favorites from people who know the city.

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Outbrain (a company designed to help readers find relevant and related posts upon a blog) has announced that they are now providing support for the Squarespace platform.

We’re happy to announce that we have launched widget support for the Squarespace platform. This release makes it easy for anyone using Squarespace to easily add the Outbrain widget to their blog simply by going to the Get Widget page, choosing the type of widget you’d like to add and clicking on the Squarespace button. From there, you simply add the code to your blog by following a few easy steps. (Official Outbrain Blog)

Previously Squarespace fans had to install the Outbrain script manually (not to mention half blind), a feat only a true geek would attempt.

Now Outbrain provides steps for users to install the script upon their own blogs, which should help make Squarespace more competitive against rivals (like Blogger and Typepad).

This should also present Squarespace users another opportunity to generate revenue via Outbrain’s recommendation ad widget (which is currently available only to blogs with a large amount of traffic).

The Associated Press today announced their newest AP Stylebook, this time focusing on social media guidelines. The “page turner” includes such changes as turning “Web site” to “website” and includes 41 additional definitions, use cases and rules.

What makes no sense from my point of view is turning “smartphone” into “smart phone” which from my 14 years experience in the cellular industry is just simply wrong. They’ve also hyphenated “e-reader” and they list “fan”, “friend” and “follow” as nouns and verbs.

Acronyms also make an appearance including ROFL (Rolling On The Floor Laughing), BRB (Be Right Back), G2G (Got To Go) and POS (Parent Over Shoulder) among several others.

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Today we’re introducing a new like and reblog feature enabled across the whole of WordPress.com. [...]

If you decide that you want to share the post with your own readers, you can click the “Reblog this post” link and you’ll be taken to the new QuickPress tab on the WordPress.com home page. This will auto-fill a snippet of the post text, a link back to the original post, and a link to the blog. If the post includes any images we’ll also automatically add a thumbnail image to the reblog post. Finally you can add your own comments to the reblog post then select which blog you’d like to post it to (if you have more than one). (Official WordPress Blog) read more

Facebook has been under fire by the U.S. Judiciary Committee for months over privacy concerns. While Facebook this week announced much easier to control privacy settings, it apparently was too little, too late for the U.S. Judiciary Committee who have now begun the steps to open a full probe into the companies activities.

Committee chair John Conyers sent a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which he stated:

“We would appreciate a detailed explanation of the information about Facebook users that your company has provided to third parties without the knowledge of the account holders — particularly in circumstances in which the users did not expressly opt for this kind of information sharing.”

The committee expects Facebook to provide a full history of prior privacy polices alongside current changes and how they are affecting how Facebook has change their policies.

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