Yahoo! on September 16 provided a glimpse at the faded Internet search star's future identity that included making its Web pages more personalised and social.
"You are going to see some changes from us," Yahoo! chief product officer Blake Irving promised at a "Project Runway" event at the firm's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.
"You are going to see things that happen fast, that are innovative and that make customers and advertisers delighted." Blake joined Yahoo! a hundred days earlier as part of change brought about by chief executive Carol Bartz, who replaced company co-founder Jerry Yang as head of what was a floundering Internet search pioneer being lost in Google's growing shadow.
Under Bartz, Yahoo! struck a recently implemented deal to have Internet queries at its Web pages handled by Microsoft's new Bing search engine. Engineers at Yahoo! on Thursday showed off new products, tools and services they have been able to create since shifting the "block-and-tackle" labor of scouring the Web to Microsoft.
Yahoo! has revamped its free Web-based email service and is weaving Twitter into its online pages so people can more easily fire off or view updates at the microblogging service. Yahoo! already allows for Facebook updates.
Yahoo! also showed off a new application for Apple's coveted iPad and other tablet computers to deliver its news pages to such devices with snazzy presentations and intuitive use of touch-screen controls.
Yahoo! said it was changing its style to be more "iterative," upgrading and evolving Web pages, tools and offerings routinely and often. Products and changes demonstrated by Yahoo! were already being rolled out or would be in the coming months, executives said.