Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is a computer services company with a mission to "be the most essential global Internet service for consumers and businesses". It operates an Internet portal, the Yahoo! Directory and a host of other services including the popular Yahoo! Mail. It was founded by Stanford graduate students David Filo and Jerry Yang in January 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

According to Alexa Internet and Netcraft, both of which are Web trends companies, Yahoo! is the most visited website on the Internet today. The global network of Yahoo! websites received 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2005.

In June 2005 Yahoo! acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation, primarily from weblogs (hence the name), which produces a simple list (and also an RSS feed thereof) of freshly updated Weblogs, ordered according to recentness of update. blo.gs was the first Internet company hosted on a domain hack Yahoo! acquired, del.icio.us being the second.

As Yahoo!'s popularity has increased, so has the range of features it offers, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet. These now include: Yahoo! Mail, a Web-based e-mail service, an instant messaging client, a very popular mailing list service (Yahoo! Groups), online gaming and chat, various news and information portals, online shopping and auction facilities.

Many of these are based at least in part on previously independent services, which Yahoo! has acquired - such as the popular GeoCities free Web-hosting service, Rocketmail, and various competing mailing list providers such as eGroups.

Many of these take-overs were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services, as Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. An example of this would be their claiming intellectual property rights for the content on their servers, which the original companies had not done.

From Wikipedia

Latest Yahoo News

Yahoo News hires Virginia Heffernan as national correspondent

More exciting personnel news from the purple mothership: Yahoo News has hired Virginia Heffernan, a veteran of the New York Times, as national correspondent. Heffernan will cover "culture and politics from a digital perspective," the company said in a release. Heffernan will be based in Yahoo's New York offices, reporting to managing editor Hillary Frey. [...]

Yahoo News hires Olivier Knox as its first White House correspondent

Yahoo News has hired Olivier Knox, Congressional correspondent for Agence France-Press, to be its White House correspondent--the first in Yahoo's 16-year history. Knox--who has spent more than a decade with AFP covering politics, including eight years covering the White House--starts on Feb. 13. He will be based in Washington and report to politics editor Chris [...]

Yahoo Hires its First White House Correspondent

Yahoo's hiring of  Oliver Knox as its  first White House correspondent points to the company's growing aspirations as a producer of original news content beyond the massive aggregation system it already has in place. 

Can Yahoo be trusted with Flickr?

Flickr is Yahoo?s saving grace. Amidst the site?s myriad of problems and ill-defined purpose, the photo-sharing platform has been a beacon of hope, with its dedicated users and razor-sharp focus. Which is why Flickr subscribers are concerned about Yahoo?s direction for the site.

Yahoo Right Media Exchange To Show AOL Inventory

Yahoo and AOL announced a partnership where AOL will use Yahoo?s Right Media Exchange to provide access to AOL inventory as part of the display ad agreements announced last year. ?The inventory AOL makes available under the display advertising agreement ?