Profiles News
The blog for Profiles news

By now, you’ve probably heard about Yahoo!’s Open Strategy, but for most of you, this remains a fairly abstract concept that translates to a new look for your profile on Yahoo!.

Several of you have emailed or commented asking for an explanation of “Open and Social”-so here’s a quick top-line of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy:

Changing what’s under the hood: this is what’s driving the change to profiles. The old profiles system was outdated and not ready to support the capabilities required of a modern social site. We have also developed and deployed a completely new platform for identity and social capability across Yahoo! and the web.

Make it more “social:” For most of you, the term “social” means “social networking” and you instantly think of sites like Facebook and MySpace. At Yahoo!, we see social in a different way.

Yahoo’s CTO, Ari Balogh probably said it best: “This is about making Yahoo! social in every dimension. Social is not a destination — it’s a dimension and it will infuse all aspects of a consumer’s experience on the Web.”

Instead of going to a specific social networking page, social at Yahoo! means taking your activity and identity with you. This means that when you leave a comment on Buzz, Local, or even third party sites (after you grant them permission, of course), your activity can be shared on many of the Yahoo! “starting points”, such as Mail or the home page. This means that you don’t have to visit a specific website to keep up to date on your friends and their activities.

Open it up: A while back Jerry Yang demonstrated the new look for Yahoo! Mail at CES, which includes opening up Mail to developers. What this means for you as a user is more functionality, more features, and more customization. This is enabled by the YOS platform, which allows developers to integrate with and extend key parts of Yahoo!, including Mail, MyYahoo, and others. Check out the Mail demo from CES and the recap over at the Mail blog, here.

All of this means that you will be able to enjoy more social versions of your favorite Yahoo! services and add new features to those services by using 3rd-party applications enabled by the Yahoo Open Strategy.

Your new profile is at the center of many of these social experiences. Adding Connections from your profile will allow you to share and stay in touch with the key people in your life as you and they use Yahoo! every day.

There’s still a lot of work to be done to make these features a reality across Yahoo!, so be on the look out for new versions of several Yahoo! services. Please continue to share your constructive feedback with us, as we know the only way for us to improve these services is with your help.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

On each of your profiles you may have noticed the “Guestbook” feature. The Guestbook allows your connections (or, if you wish, anyone who comes across your profile) to leave you a message, much like a virtual white-board or answering machine.

For those of you who have tinkered with the Guestbook feature you might have noticed that it supports some HTML-this means that for those of you wishing to share links with your friends, this might be a great way to post your favorite website, page, or site until the “Cool Links” functionality returns to profiles.

To do this, just enter some basic HTML code for links in your Guestbook. You’ll be using the “a href” tag (you can see it in the screenshot below, and in the visible code below)-just substitute in your URL where the http://www.yprofileblog.com is, and then add in the appropriate description text after the carrot (that’s the >) where it says “Profiles News Blog”.

<a href=”http://www.yprofileblog.com”>Profiles News Blog</a>

Once you hit “Post Comment” the code will show up as an active link, ready for your connections to click and view!

For those of you wishing to share your Guestbook with anyone who happens across your profile, you can easily do this by going to the Settings page and then selecting “Anyone” from the drop down by Guestbook. To restrict the Guestbook to your connections only, just change this to “My Connections,” and click “Save” at the bottom of the page.

Hope this helps and have fun using your new Guestbook!

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

We know that each of you have different needs in respect to what information you want to share with others, and what you’d like to keep private. With the recent introduction of updates within profiles, many of you had questions about how to change who-sees-what-information, and, the easiest way to make some things public, while still managing to keep other things private.

This week the profiles team pushed out another new update allowing for better customization and control of your information while you’re on the Yahoo! network.

From the newly updated “updates” page, you can select which services on the Yahoo! network broadcast your updates to your connections, and which do not.

Over the next coming months, you’ll see even more sources for updates and more places to display your updates across the network. With each new addition, you’ll be able to customize and modify your preferences from this page.

To get started, point your browser to: http://profiles.yahoo.com/settings/updates

Be sure you’ve clicked on “Manage My Updates” (1)

Then, from the drop-down menus (2) select who you’d like to view your updates-you can choose from “Anyone,” “My Connections,” or “No One.”

Click “Save” to apply your changes. (3)

You can also manage your updates on an individual level, using the “Updates you are sharing” window to the right. (4)

This window shows all of your recent changes to your profile, your Buzz Activity, as well as any other network activity that you choose to broadcast.

Just click on the “x” next to each of the updates to hide that particular notification. (5) This change will only apply to that specific update, as opposed to the drop-down option, which changes your preferences for all updates of that type.

Additionally, whenever you change your settings on an update, you can see your latest changes in the box below your settings in the “Updates you are sharing” box. (6)

Of course, if you don’t want to share any updates with anyone, you can de-select the “Share My Updates” box in the top left side to prevent any updates from posting to your profile or anywhere else on the Yahoo! network.

That’s it. I’ll keep you posted of new features and additions to the Yahoo! Network as they come along, including integration with other Yahoo! services. Until then, happy updating!

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

For those of you who are on broadband accounts (AT&T, Rogers, Verizon, British Telecom, Telecom New Zealand) and are having trouble adding or deleting aliases we’re happy to share an update with you.

We’ve identified the issue that prevents you from accessing the “Add/Delete” screen and are working to resolve this issue, but in the meantime, broadband users can manage their aliases by going here: http://manage.members.yahoo.com/YOURFULLEMAILADDRESSHERE - please replace “YOURFULLEMAILADDRESSHERE” with your full email address.

So, for example, if your email address was yahoo@att.net you would enter http://manage.members.yahoo.com/yahoo@att.net (please note, this is only an example and not a functional email address).

From here, click on the “View my Profiles” link up at the top.

To add a new alias, click “Create New Public Profile.” (1)

To delete an alias, click on the “delete” link next to the alias you wish to remove. (2)

Once you’re through editing, click “Finished Editing” up at the top. (3)

That’s it.

Until the issue with broadband accounts has been resolved, to add or delete an alias you’ll still need to use the http://manage.members.yahoo.com/YOURFULLEMAILADDRESSHERE link. I’ll keep you posted on any future updates regarding this issue.

Whether you have a broadband account or a regular Yahoo! account, you can still access your profile the same way, by going to: http://profiles.yahoo.com

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

UPDATE: I apologize to anyone who accessed this post between Friday, November 14th and Sunday, November 16th as an incorrect link was posted. The correct address to access your broadband account is http://manage.members.yahoo.com/YOURID, not http://members.manage.yahoo.com/YOURID as previously stated. The links in the article above have been corrected. I apologize, as this was my mistype. I apologize for any added frustration or confusion this may have caused. If you are still having trouble, please email me directly at yprofileblog [at] yahoo [dot] com.

While you’ve been polishing your profile you might have noticed a section called “Updates.” Here, you can check out what your connections are up to-including who they’re connecting to, what their latest status message is, and, stories they’ve “buzzed up” or commented on recently. Now, you can also see what your friends are up to on Buzz by going straight to the Yahoo! Buzz Beta homepage.

Not familiar with Yahoo! Buzz? It’s a recent addition to the Yahoo! family launched in February 2008 that allows you to submit stories you find online, or, more commonly, vote up stories that other users have already submitted.

Last week the Buzz team added a few new social features, including commenting, updates, and viewing your connections’ activity. If enabled, whenever you “buzz up” a story, it shows in your new profile, providing another way to share your interests with your connections.

To check out the latest changes to Buzz, be sure to visit http://buzz.yahoo.com and start buzzing! The main page of Buzz scrolls through the top buzzed stories in the last 12 hours (default, but you can change it to cover more or less time), the top searches, and your most recent connection updates.

In order for you to “buzz up” a story or comment on a story, you must be logged into your Yahoo! account, and can opt to have this information displayed on your profile and to your connections.

To change your settings on whether or not you want to share your Buzz updates, you can go to the Settings tab in your profile, and then click on Updates. Then, check or uncheck “Yahoo! Buzz” depending on your preference. (For a shortcut, just click here: http://profiles.yahoo.com/settings/updates)

If you’re a blogger (like me) you can submit your own stories to Yahoo! Buzz by going to the publishers page for more information.

You can quickly and easily add a Buzz widget to most blogs, letting your connections know what you’re up to much more easily. For more details on adding the Buzz widget to your blog, please visit the Yahoo! Buzz publisher’s page. Or, to manually submit a story you find online, go to: http://buzz.yahoo.com/submit/ to share your story’s details.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

As promised, below you’ll find a tutorial walking you through the steps to creating and deleting aliases. This is done through the “Account Info” link within profiles.

UPDATE: If you are logged in using a broadband Yahoo! account (@sbcglobal.net, @att.net, etc.) please be sure to follow the steps outlined on the “Update for Broadband Users” post INSTEAD of the tutorial below.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

For those of you with questions about linking your aliases, or just wanted a quick step-by-step guide on how to link/merge/bind your aliases, you’re in luck

Below you’ll find a quick video tutorial on how to link your alias IDs to your primary Yahoo! profile. This tutorial also shows you how to set your profile to be viewable by “anyone” as opposed to just your connections– the default setting.

The end of the video mentions checking out the “next tutorial on creating a new alias”– I’ll get this tutorial up and posted for you either later today or tomorrow, which will walk you through the steps on how to create a new alias.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

UPDATE: The tutorial on how to add and delete aliases has been posted and can be found here.

UPDATE: If you are logged in using a broadband Yahoo! account (@sbcglobal.net, @att.net, etc.) and are trying to add or delete an alias please be sure to follow the steps outlined on the “Update for Broadband Users” post.

Thanks for all your feedback and comments. The team has been working hard over the past week and we are excited to share with you a few changes we’ve made to improve your profiles experience based on your input.

We understand that some of you miss the old profile; however, Yahoo! is committed to build upon this new profile and we hope you will send us your suggestions to make it even better.

Now to the changes we’ve already made. Some of you may have noticed that while perusing your friend’s profiles you previously came across empty profiles, making it difficult for you to learn more about a specific user. We’ve repopulated ALL of the profiles (whether they’ve logged into the new service or not) with the information that a user had previously entered, and set anything that was public before, back to public. This includes display images and limited profile information and details.

As a result now, when you’re in a Yahoo! Group or a chat room, you’ll be able to learn a little more about the user you’re talking to, whether they’ve updated their new profile or not.

In addition to this, we’ve also updated some of the error messages you were seeing to alleviate some of the confusion. Previously, if you searched for your own ID before you migrated over to the new profiles, you saw a blank profile. Now, you’ll be taken right into the new profiles service and will have the opportunity to update your information right there.

If you come across an alias that hasn’t been linked to a main ID, you’ll be told “This user has chosen not to link this alias with their profile on Yahoo! in order to maintain their privacy.”

We also heard from you that linking aliases wasn’t clearly explained, so we’ve updated the text to do a better job of explaining what’s going on, and how to make yourself (and your aliases) discoverable.

You all have been incredibly patient and we appreciate all of the feedback you’ve provided us over the past few weeks. We know that there are several other improvements you all would like to see, and we’re working hard to incorporate them into the new profiles service.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

Hi all,

Many of you have expressed your concern with the newest version of profiles, and believe me, we’re reading and hearing your comments and are committed to helping you maximize your experience with the new profiles.

First off, we want to apologize straight away for not being more proactive in communicating in advance that we were making changes to our profiles. We should have let you know that change was coming.

The first issue many of you have brought up that we’d like to address right off the bat is the concern of those of you who have aliases on Yahoo! Groups, Games, Finance, and Chat. The new profile provides users with a single identity while they’re on the Yahoo! network. Some of you may have heard about Yahoo!’s new strategy for a more open and social network, which allows for you to have one identity while you’re using Yahoo!, essentially making you, you.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t still have an “alias” while you’re on the Yahoo! network-you can still use multiple identities on Groups, Chat, or Finance. However, these aliases CANNOT have their own profile page, nor can they have any unique profile data associated with them. This means that by default when another user clicks a link pointing to your alias, they’ll be greeted by a message telling them that “there is nothing to see here,” unless you bind your alias to your primary profile. This also means that if a user tries to search for you by your alias, they won’t be able to find you.

There’s a couple of ways around this, though, that we want to make sure you know about. First of all, you can of course create a completely new account so that you have one account for each identity you want to manage.

Second, if you want to, you can bind your alias to your profile, thus merging it to your identity.

If you choose to bind your aliases to your profile, anyone who clicks a link to see what was formerly your alias profile will now only see your main profile. Additionally, anyone who searches for you by your alias will now be able to find your main profile.

You now have a choice: you can either merge your identities, allowing users to view your main profile, or, you can keep your aliases separate from your main profile even though they won’t have their own profiles. The choice is up to you.

If you do bind an alias to your profile, you need to first make sure you have a profile.

To do this, go to: http://profiles.yahoo.com and set up your profile. When you log in you’ll be asked to go through the new user flow which will pull in your old profile data and give you the option of adding new information-meaning, you don’t have to start from scratch.

Once you’ve created your new profile, go here: http://profiles.yahoo.com/settings/peoplesearch From there, you’ll be able to select which aliases are searchable and linked to your profile. You’ll also have the option of disconnecting any aliases from your profile you don’t want associated with your identity.

To add altogether new aliases to your account, go here: https://edit.yahoo.com/identity/manage?show=a.

Additionally, if you wish to allow all users to view your full and complete profile, whether they’re a connection or not, you can update this information by going here: http://profiles.yahoo.com/settings/permissions From here, you can select what portions of your profile you want to be visible to connections, as well as to people who have not yet become a connection.

We know this has been a rough transition for some of you and, and are committed to helping you use, understand, and (hopefully) enjoy your new profile.

If you want more information on how to use your profile, start with the new profiles tutorial, located here: http://help.yahoo.com/tutorials/prof/index.html

We also know lots of you worked hard on your old profiles and want your data. If you feel like you’re missing data, we’ve saved a copy of your old profile (and alias) and our Customer Care team can retrieve this information. You won’t, however, be able to revert back to your old profile format, but you will be able to get any data that you think is missing. To do this, please go here http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/profiles/general.html to contact Customer Care.

Thanks for your patience.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

Welcome to the Profiles News Blog! Think of this blog as your go-to-place for all things profiles related: enhancements, tutorials, and so much more.

We’ll use this blog to communicate the most recent updates and information about profiles, as well as provide you with a few tips and tricks to make your profile experience the best it can be.

Your profile is all about you-your connections, your updates, your privacy settings, your life. We want to help you better connect with the people that matter to you in the easiest way possible, whether it’s sharing your recent updates or connecting with people from your address book- we’re here to help.

So be sure to add this blog to your My Yahoo! page, RSS feed, or subscribe via email. No matter how you subscribe, be sure to stop by often and let us know how we’re doing by leaving a comment.

I know it goes without saying, but while you’re here, try to stay on topic- share your comments, questions, suggestions on your new Yahoo! profile, but remember to be courteous and constructive, and steer clear from any profanity, racial slurs, or anything that would offend others.

Thanks again for stopping by! Be sure to check back soon for details on getting started with your new profile, including: how to maximize your experience, as well as cool tricks and tips while using your profile.

Talk to you soon!

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager