Stop prefixing and suffixing numbers to your new e-mail id just because the e-mail you want is not available.

Yahoo! Mail has now added two new domains to help you get the e-mail id you always wanted. @yahoo.com e-mail addresses are still available but if you want a change, Yahoo! has two new domains @ymail.com & @rocketmail.com e-mail addresses available for sign-up now.

While @ymail.com looks inspired from @gmail.com, @rocketmail.com is the good old mail service that Yahoo! has acquired long back.

If “rocketmail” rings a bell, it’s because it’s vintage Internet. Back in the ’90s, RocketMail was one of the very first free Webmail services. Yahoo! acquired it in 1997 and built the first version of Yahoo! Mail based on RocketMail technology. Some of the original RocketMail users chose to keep their RocketMail IDs to show that they had been among the first users of Webmail.

Go get yourname@ymail.com or yourname@rocketmail.com now HERE !!!

The Yahoo! Announcement

The rumours have been settled. Microsoft has formally announced its intentions of acquiring Yahoo! . Leaving aside the complexity of the financial offer, one simple thing is Microsoft is offering $31 per share, a whopping 62% premium on the present share price of Yahoo!.

An excerpt from Microsoft’s press release …

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008.

But what does this mean for me ?

A bigger competitor for Google but no idea how effective the acquisition will be if at all it happens.

Whatever will happen to Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger and Flickr, three services I use almost all the time.

What do you think of this acquistion ? Does Microsoft buying Yahoo! make sense ?

Microsoft Press Release

The TechCrunch post

This is surely one plugin which will really take your blog to the next level. Get ready to try Yahoo! Shortcuts - a brand new Wordpress plugin. It lets you liven up your blog posts by letting you insert images, shortcuts, badges all based on what you write in your blog post.

The Yahoo! Shortcuts powered Wordpress plugin is an easy way for you to enrich blog posts with great content (maps, finance quotes, news headlines, Flickr photos, and much more.) As you compose your blog post, the Shortcuts plugin looks for content related to what you are writing about. A Shortcut may lead your reader to a finance quote for a public company, a map of a point of interest, a Flickr image, or information about specific companies, products, and people. When it finds relevant content, it lets you know.

The process is simple. You just upload the plugin and activate it from your Dashboard. Next time you will write a blog post, you will see a new box on the right hand side which will say something like “4 Shortcuts Found”. Click “Review this post”. You will be taken to a page where you can see all shortcuts that have been found. There you can insert the shortcuts you want.

You can add Flickr images too which will be shown at the bottom. All the images are also Creative Commons licensed. You need not worry about the copyright !

As simple as that. So try Yahoo! Shortcuts today and liven up your blog posts.

Visit Yahoo! Shortcuts

Via - Digital Inspiration

You read it right. Yahoo! has announced on its blog that it is going in for a revamp of the Yahoo! Mail Classic interface.

Yahoo! has added several new features to its Classic mail and also removed some. Looks like Yahoo! is making another attempt to retain users who do not like the new Y! mail interface and want to move to GMail for its cool features.

Yahoo! mail blog writes :

The Classic team has been working diligently to fine tune the underlying technology for Classic Mail. That fine tuning is the foundation that has been critical not only in making the product available in Hindi, but also in making it easier to update features for all of Classic. In short, they are both part of the same overall project.

Some of the new features which Yahoo! has added are :

1. Auto-save to Draft - Greate feature if your computer crashes while composing a mail.
2. Address Book = Contacts - All references to “Address Book” got changed to “Contacts” in the new Yahoo! Mail Classic.
3. Folder Renaming - Rename your Yahoo! mail folders from within the interface itself.
4. Downloading - In most cases, downloading now requires just one click!
5. Rich-text/Plain-text link - On the Compose page above the message window, you can click either Rich Text or Plain Text to select the format you prefer.

In short, some good new features to have.

I think Yahoo! will be refining the Classic interface slowly to give a competition to GMail. And overall it will be good choice for the users too …

Yahoo! Publisher Network has added PayPal as an option of payment for its publishers. So if you are using YPN as a source of income for your blog, you can now get your payments via Paypal.

More significant in this blog post, is YPN reducing the minimum payout to 50$ vs the Google Adsense $100 minimum. This might cause new publishers to go with Yahoo instead of Google since it is much easier to make the first $50.

Now only if Google Adsense would lower the payment threshold from 100$ to 50$ …