PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf has left his long-held position at Yahoo, according to his Twitter account. Lerdorf joined Yahoo in 2002 and has worked for the company as an engineer since. Lerdorf is most notable for creating the original PHP engine, and for being a notable open source developer, speaker and author. Lerdorf developed PHP in 1995 after building up a collection of C macros that he was using in web application development. The original meaning of the anagram is ‘Personal HomePage’, and the language and environment are still the most popular in use on the web today.

I corrected the headline for one of the articles I published earlier today about an investment made by Bassel Ojjeh in ArabCrunch.NET.

Turns out Ojjeh is actually no longer senior vice president and head of Yahoo!’s strategic data solutions group. The man apparently left the company a few weeks ago but hadn’t yet found the time to change his LinkedIn profile.

Bassel Ojjeh started his career in the software business as developer and later senior manager of Fox Software, which merged with Microsoft in 1992.

Last week Google launched the Music Onebox — a special new music search product that lets users stream songs in their entirety for free. Today, Yahoo Video is answering by improving its music video search offering. When you search for a song or artists, Yahoo will extract music videos of the most popular songs and albums for that artists or band. It appears that most of the songs are pulled from YouTube, Last.fm and other music sites.

So a search for U2 on Yahoo Video will show a list of the band’s albums, such as The Joshua Tree, and the music videos for popular songs, such as “Beautiful Day.” When you click on an album, you’ll see the music videos for all of the songs on the album. If you click on an album or song, it will show videos for the album or song in an overlay page.

With 600 million unique visits per month, Yahoo sees a large amount of traffic to its sites. In order to maintain sites in the cloud, Yahoo uses Traffic Server, a piece of software initially acquired via Inktomi, to support this massive amount of traffic. Tomorrow, Yahoo will be debuting an open source version of Traffic Server. The code is available through the Incubator project at the Apache Software Foundation.

Traffic Server enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for an entire cloud computing stack. Yahoo says that with the open source version of Traffic Server, organizations can benefit from access to cached online content. In addition, Traffic Server enables faster responses to requests for stored Web objects, such as files, news articles or images.

At today’s Yahoo analyst event, Yahoo exec Bryan Lamkin shed some light on the company’s recent status update numbers. Yahoo launched its “status-casting” feature a few months ago, which added basic status updates to its Mail and Messenger products. In both Yahoo Mail and Messenger 10, you can update your status and all of your contacts who also use either of those two products can see your updates.

Today, Lamkin says that Yahoo is seeing 800 million status message updates per month through this new feature. AIM has been doing this for sometime now, so Yahoo’s status update feature isn’t new but the quantity of updates is certainly something worth noting. The integration of these status updates into mail and IM represents the merging of private and public messaging.

Remember when Yahoo started to roll out its new homepage last summer? It’s been live for all users for about three months now, and today Yahoo’s annual Analyst Day, senior vice president Tapan Bhat gave an overview of how the redesigned homepage is performing. In the past three months, pageviews are up 9 percent, and time spent on the homepage is up 20 percent.

The whole focus of the redesign, and across Yahoo in general, says Bhat is to increase what he calls PageYield. The yield of a page on Yahoo is measure of how engaged consumers are with that page. (As opposed to PageRank, which is how Google scores pages on the Web in its search results). PageYield is a measure of how much time is spent on each Yahoo page and how many pageviews it gets, but also how much downstream traffic the page generates, and how often people come back.

Not wanting to be left completely behind, Yahoo will soon launch their own real time search engine too. But unlike Microsoft and Google, they won’t be partnering with Twitter and Facebook directly for the data (perhaps memories of their ill-fated blog search engine from 2005 linger). Instead, we’ve heard, they’ll work with one of the existing real time search engines. If our source is correct, that partner is OneRiot, and the product will launch very soon.

There isn’t much more to say about this right now. We’ve reached out to both Yahoo and OneRiot for comment and await their reply. The look of the Yahoo search results may look similar to the OneRiot/WebMynd Firefox plugin that adds real time results to the side of normal Google search results – it certainly makes sense to keep the results separated. See image below.

OneRiot has raised $27 million to date in venture capital.

It appears that Yahoo Mail is suffering from an outage. Complaints from Yahoo Mail users are all over Twitter. It’s unclear how extensive the outage is and what is causing the issue but we’ll report back when we find out.

Yahoo Mail is currently the No. 1 Web mail service with 300 million people using it worldwide, so even a smaller outage could result in a large amount of people not having access to their email accounts. Competitor Gmail also succumbed to a serious outage recently, leaving users with nearly eight hours of downtime.

Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit, Founder’s Fund managing partner Sean Parker gave a provocative presentation entitled “The New Era Of The Network Service.” In it, he argues that so-called “network services” like Facebook (which he helped start) and Twitter will soon dominate the web, rather than “information services” like Google and Yahoo.

It’s a very interesting idea, to say the least, and obviously you’re interested in it, as about 200 of you commented on it yesterday. So we’ve obtained Parker’s full slide deck from his presentation. Find the full presentation embedded below, definitely worth the read.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is resigning from Yahoo’s board of directors. According to MarketWatch, he said “there was not a need at this time for an activist investor” at Yahoo anymore and that he’d rather focus on other companies. The subtext there being that either A) he feels that his work is done and he can move on now that the search deal with Microsoft is moving towards government approval, or B) he can make more money by trying to control some other company.

My mother always yells at me when she looks at my pictures on Flickr, saying that I don’t take enough pictures of people. The truth is, I do, I just put most of those on Facebook because it’s a billion times better for pictures of your friends because you can easily tag them. Now Flickr is gaining the same functionality — but better.

Its new “People In Photos” feature is long overdue. With it, you’ll be able to select a picture and start typing a person’s name, which will then scan your Flickr contacts to see who it should add as a tag to the picture. And like Facebook, you’ll be able to draw an outline around someone’s face to show exactly who they are in the picture.

We’ve just learned that Scott Dietzen, VP Applications at Yahoo who worked on key products such as Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Answers, Groups, and Zimbra, has left the company. The surprising news comes on the same day the Sunnyvale company is announcing its not-too-bad yet not-excellent-either third quarter earnings.

Scott Dietzen joined Yahoo with the acquisition of open source email startup Zimbra, where he was President and CTO. Dietzen went on to replace Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s former SVP of Communications & Communities, when he left the company in June 2008.

Yahoo announced third quarter earnings today, showing net income more than tripling to $186 million, or $0.13 a share, nearly double analysts estimates of $0.07 a share.

This was definitely a financial achievement for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, but it was done almost entirely through cost cutting. Total operating expenses of $775 million was pared down by $169 million from a year ago. In comparison, net income rose $130 million from a year ago.

What investors really want to see is revenues go up again. Unfortunately, Yahoo’s total revenue was down 12 percent from last year to $1.6 billion. And revenues minus traffic acquisition costs (the money Yahoo shares with advertising partners) declined 14 percent to $1.1 billion. On the bright side, revenue were flat with the second quarter by both measures. On the conference call, Yahoo is characterizing revenues as “stabilizing.”

My notes from the conference call Q&A after the jump.

As Microsoft and Yahoo await government approval of their pending deal to join their two search businesses at the hip, the two companies received an important endorsement today from the world’s top advertisers.

In a letter today from the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and signed by the CEOs of the Publicis Groupe, WPP, Interpublic, and Omnicom, the advertisers gave their full support to the deal, urging “the Department of Justice to bring its antitrust review to a speedy conclusion.” The letter notes that the deal would strengthen Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s search advertising offerings, and thus would be good for competition.

Earlier this month, a couple reports came out suggesting that Bing’s search market share took a hit in September. Hitwise reported that Bing’s share of U.S. searches was down 5 percent (in absolute terms, it was a half-point drop to 8.9 percent share). StatCounter marked an even steeper 12 percent decline (or a full 1.1 percent drop to 8.5 percent share). The headlines followed. But now comScore says all of that’s bunk.

Tonight it released its qSearch market share numbers, which are widely followed on Wall Street, and they show no decline for Bing in September. According to comScore, Bing’s U.S. search market share remained steady at 9.4 percent in September, up from 9.3 percent in August. That is not blowing the doors off of anything, but it is at least holding its own.

A class action lawsuit brought in 2006 by several Yahoo! pay-per-click search advertising customers has been settled, one of the parties involved who received an e-mail about the settlement informs us. In the e-mail, administrator Rust Consulting lets the concerned parties (”all persons that purchased, directly or indirectly, Yahoo! pay-per-click advertising in the U.S. marketplace”) know that the court has granted preliminary approval of the Settlement and has provisionally certified the Settlement Class.

The lawsuit (PDF) alleges that customers contracted for targeted ad placements through two products, “Sponsored Search” and “Content Match” (and predecessor products provided by Overture and GoTo.com) and that Yahoo! breached its contract with its customers by allowing Yahoo! ads to be displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites (bulk registration sites), pop-ups, pop-unders and typosquatting sites. According to the message, which is reproduced on a dedicated website about the case, plaintiffs brought claims for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, and unfair business practices.

Do you like sounding like an idiot? Does the thought of doing so in front of millions of people appeal to you? Then Yahoo has just the thing for you (or, rather, Y!ou).

Yahoo has just launched Yodel Studio, a site for you to yes, record yourself yodeling. The idea is for Yahoo users to remix the service’s signature sound for a chance at recognition, most notably, on Yahoo’s homepage which is visited by tens of millions of people each month. Yahoo is also pledging up to $130,000 for local and global charities on behalf of each yodel submitted.

Twitter has produced a vibrant ecosystem of third party applications thanks to the release of its API. If you take a look at Twitter app store oneforty, there are thousands of applications and sites that are using Twitter’s various APIs to build useful and innovative applications. Which is why Yahoo Meme, Yahoo’s microblogging tool that hopes to compete against Twitter and Tumblr, is releasing its own API for third party developer use. The problem: Yahoo Meme doesn’t have many users.

Yahoo is offering Meme’s open API built on top of the YQL (Yahoo Query Language) platform. The API features compliance with OAuth for access to user data. Yahoo meme lets users post their own content (including text, photos, videos, links and more) and repost the content of others with one-click publishing, allows users to follow other Meme users (via one-way connections, no friend authorization is required) and comment on their posts. Meme’s content limits are higher than Twitter’s—the limit is 2,000 characters.

Yahoo is losing another executive today. Patrick Barry, who heads up Yahoo’s Connected TV group, sent out an email to staff this morning (reproduced below) informing them that he is leaving at the end of the month to “move on to new projects.” According to the email (below), he is briefing staff right now. (Josh Jacobs, head of ad technology platforms, is also leaving).

Through a series of deals with TV manufacturers like Samsung and Sony, the Connected TV product brings Web widgets from Yahoo to your TV. As such, it is a pretty central part of Yahoo’s strategy to connect consumers to the Web and the information that matters to them most.

Remember when Yahoo was nothing more than a directory of the best links on the Web as determined by human editors? The Web is too vast for any humans to keep track of, but what if you could combine the heavy lifting of computers with the smarts and expert knowledge of humans? Well, Yahoo now has a patent for that.

Yahoo today was awarded a U.S. patent for a “Method and apparatus for search ranking using human input and automated ranking”, which was originally filed more than 7 years ago. The patent, numbered 7,599,911, can be viewed on the USPTO website.

The patented method described in the documents calculates search rankings based on a combination of automated algorithms and human editor input. In the patent, Yahoo describes a way that previously-collected input from human editors can be mixed in (“blended”) with what its search algorithms return, essentially resulting in better search results.