At the end of last May, Yahoo released an experimental version of Placemaker, a “geo-enrichment” platform. What it does is help developers make applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content (think RSS feeds, web pages, news, status updates etc.) and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup. In layman’s terms: it can detect places by scanning content and is capable of putting the aggregate data on a map.

While Placemaker does not serve as a geocoder and thus does not perform address recognition on street-level, it is perfectly capable of geo-extracting and indexing documents or atomic units of text, giving third-party developers the means to mark-up and index Web content geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and language-neutral manner (and Geo Microformats-compatible, too). But the process of parsing the data could sure have been made a lot easier, and if you weren’t a developer there wasn’t really any use for the tool at all.

At the beginning of last year, Yahoo made a fairly large acquisition with the purchase of online video distribution and advertising platform provider Maven Networks. Under the terms of the agreement, which we reported as a rumor the same day the papers were signed, the company acquired the startup for approximately $160 million. At the time, the press release touted the acquisition to lead to an expansion of the “state-of-the-art consumer video and advertising experiences on Yahoo.com and Yahoo’s network of leading premium video publishers across the web”.

Now we’ve learned Yahoo is going to kill Maven Networks instead, the most recent in a long series of deadpooling of products and services by the Sunnyvale Internet behemoth. (also see update)

With all the chatter about Yahoo’s impending roll-out of a completely overhauled brand - see Techmeme for more - this particular tip that landed in our inbox last night definitely caught our attention.

TechCrunch reader Bradley Scott Shoemaker checks in with us to tell us this new Yahoo homepage turned up when visiting the portal using Google’s Chrome browser. All his other installed browsers still showed the classic Yahoo website, which lead him to believe they’re gradually bucket testing the new redesign for now (update: some users reported seeing it for over a month already).

VoIP service provider JAJAH just recently turned three years old and is today announcing a more important milestone: according to the heavily-funded startup, the one billionth call connection on the JAJAH platform was made some time ago. Unsurprisingly, that call was actually made using Yahoo’s Voice service, which is powered by JAJAH after both companies forged a major partnership for VoIP services in April last year.

JAJAH CEO Trevor Healy says the service has attracted 25 million users since its launch, which means every user has on average made 40 calls through the company’s IP telephony platform if we use back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Acquiring Yahoo, one employee at a time: Microsoft has recruited Kevin Timmons, former lead of Yahoo’s data center team, to head up its Data Center Services organization. Timmons was once director of Operations at GeoCities and worked his way up to VP of Operations at Yahoo, where he led the build-out of the company’s data centers and infrastructure.

This move comes shortly after Microsoft data center exec Michael Manos left Redmond to fill a new position at Digital Realty Trust, and only two months after the company hired another Yahoo executive - Dayne Sampson - for a key position at Microsoft Global Foundation Services (which Data Center Services is a part of).

No sooner do we finish writing up Yahoo deadpooling yet another project, Gallery, do we get a tip that Yahoo apparently has another money saving/making plan: Selling off domains it owns. That’s exactly what it has done with contests.com, which sold during a live auction last night.

What’s really odd though (aside from an Internet giant actually selling a domain rather than buying one), is the price at which it sold. Contests.com is a killer domain name. People like my mother love nothing more than going online and searching for contests to enter to win stuff. But what’s crazy is that Yahoo sold it for only $380,000.

One thing Yahoo has been very good at over the past year is closing down services. Today brings news of another one shutting down: Yahoo Gallery. Come July 14, it will be no more.

Yahoo Gallery was a project that never left beta testing. It was intended to showcase cool applications that were built using Yahoo’s various services and APIs. And while it was a decent idea as a way to show off cool things like Flickr apps, it never really took off. Here’s Yahoo’s explanation message about the shuttering:

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing had a strong showing in its second week, according to the latest comScore stats. You can see our analysis of Bing’s success in its first week here. Microsoft sites’ average daily penetration among U.S. searchers reached 16.7 percent during the work week of June 8-12, up 3 percentage points from the May 25-29 period (which was prior to Bing’s introduction) and up over 1 percentage point from its first week.

Microsoft’s share of search result pages in the U.S. increased to 12.1 percent during the period of June 8-12, which is also 3 percentage points above the pre-introduction work week of May 25-29, and up 1 percentage point from the week of June 2-6, 2009.

Yahoo released a new browser toolbar today for IE and Firefox which lets you add icons for your favorite Yahoo apps and Websites. When you click on the icons, you get a drop-down preview of your favorite sites, mail, stock quotes, or news feeds without having to go to those sites directly. It is only real-time in that you can check for the latest updates without going to those sites.

The toolbar is completely customizable, so you add from a large Websites or apps you want to keep handy. But if it really wants to be real-time, Yahoo needs to make it easier for you to preview your personal activity stream across sites. Other add-ons such as Friendbar try the streaming ticker approach, which I find too distracting. But perhaps a drop-down stream preview or built-in notifications when new items appear in your stream (whether that is Twitter, Facebook, or something else) would be preferable.

You may find this hard to believe, but back in the 90s, I was what you might consider a bit of a Microsoft fanboy.

I bought practically every piece of software they made (yes, including Bob). I was at the midnight launch of Windows 95 in my hometown. I bought Windows Me and XP the day they came out. But then a combination of things happened. First, Apple’s products started to get better and the iPod served as a gateway drug of sorts to their computers. Second, the rise of Google and the web as a whole made what desktop software I was using less important. Third, Microsoft’s products went through a period of lack of innovation, or worse, regressed.

I bring this up because some people familiar with my work, seem to want to believe that I dislike all Microsoft products by default. That’s simply not true. Even to this day, I will praise the work Microsoft has done with the Xbox 360. And I find a smattering of other things within the company that I find interesting, like Azure. And now something else from Microsoft is coming on my radar: Bing.

If you’re reading this, chances are you haven’t been using an over-the-air antenna to get analog television service for quite some time. I’m not even sure I’ve seen the “rabbit ears” since the 80s. But just in case you are one of the rumored 6 million Americans who aren’t ready for the switch from analog to digital, Yahoo and YouTube are doing their part to remind you. Both sites feature analog-to-digital logos to mark the transition that happens today.

While YouTube’s is purely cosmetic, Yahoo was nice enough to link its to a site that gives users more details about the switch. But again, I’m not sure that at this point if you’ve missed the notice after notice that the transition was happening, that’s you’re surfing Yahoo either — or own a computer, or even watch TV. The U.S. government started a $1.2 billion campaign in 2007 to let people know about the switch. But somehow all that time and money still wasn’t enough as Congress had to delay the transition in February (when it was supposed to occur) and give the program more money.

Yahoo announced today that the company will be bringing on Tim Morse to replace outgoing CFO Blake Jorgensen. Morse, who is the CFO of Altera, a semiconductor firm, also previously served as the CFO and general manager of business development for General Electric Plastics.

Bartz seems to be bringing in a seasoned executive with series management chops who has both gone through GE’s rigorous training program and experienced the wild ride of being at a tech company.

Yahoo made waves recently with CEO Carol Bartz hinting at a possible search deal, for potential “boatloads of money” with Microsoft a few weeks ago.

Yahoo! is releasing their tested source code used to help power its sites and products, called Hadoop. Hadoop is free Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure and fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Yahoo made the announcement at the second annual Hadoop Summit today in Santa Clara, California, which was co-sponsored by other cloud computing vendors Amazon Web Services, Cloudera, IBM, and Sun Microsystems.

Yahoo! has been the primary developer and investor to Apache’s Hadoop. In 2006, Hadoop founder Doug Cutting joined Yahoo to lead the project of developing the open-source software. Hadoop now provides the framework for many Yahoo properties including Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and several content and ad services. Hadoop runs on more than 25,000 servers and analyzes billions of Web pages.

Web analytics firm Compete has released its data for the month of May, and as Justin Smith over at InsideFacebook has already pointed out, US traffic to Facebook.com has increased by nearly 8% to 82.9 million unique visitors last month, with Facebook Connect sites generating an additional 65 million uniques. That means that, according to Compete, a total of 113 million people in the U.S. interacted with the Facebook service. The data also shows MySpace is (still) steadily decreasing compared to the beginning of the year, while Twitter growth seems to have flattened all of the sudden.

While it is interesting to see how the hot social networks stack up in terms of traffic, I thought I’d also take a look at how well Facebook is doing compared to other Web giants like Google.com, Yahoo.com and MSN.com.

A couple of days ago we reported statistics from StatCounter suggesting the Bing, Microsoft’s new “decision” engine, had bypassed Yahoo as the number 2 search engine in the U.S. and the world. Well guess what? That same data suggests Bing reign as #2 was extremely short-lived: As in one day. Yes, the same data now suggests that just as quickly as Bing shot up, it’s now heading the opposite way. And in fact, it’s still falling.

On June 4, Bing had over 15% of the U.S. search share market, according to the data. On the same day, Yahoo had just over 10%. The following day, Yahoo had almost 11% while Bing had fallen below 10%. And yesterday, Bing had fallen to 6.68% while Yahoo rose again to 11.33%. Meanwhile, the same data suggests that while Google took a big dip during Bing’s reign, it too has now started moving back upwards as Bing declines. Not that Google was in any real danger — on June 4 (the day of Bing’s #2 position), Google had fallen to 72% of searches in the U.S. Now it’s just about back up to 80%.

Yahoo just opened its doors to a bunch of new OpenSocial apps. People who use MyYahoo as a startpage can now add apps from Mint, KaChing, WordPress, and more. The apps include a small view which appear on your MyYahoo page, but can also open up into a canvas view (which is essentially a dedicated page on Yahoo for that particular app). The Mint app, for instance, gives you a dashboard view of your finances and alerts. The WordPress app lets you do a quick post to your blog right from Yahoo. All together, Yahoo added 14 new apps for users to choose from. You can check your meds (Drugs.com), gas prices (GasBuddy), fantasy stock portfolio (kaChing), food and wine pairings (MyRecipes + Snooth), share books (WeRead), or just play Flood-It (LabPixies). You gotta add Flood-It, love that game.

Yahoo is introducing a slew of new applications that aim to complement its free webmail service today. Since December last year, Yahoo features a number of third-party applications inside Yahoo Mail, such as Xoopit, Flickr and Flixster, all in a good effort to reduce the amount of websites you need to visit as well as time you need to spend to perform certain task related to communicating with your friends, relatives or co-workers.

Starting today, that list includes other tools like online payment platform PayPal, basic photo editor Picnik, Xoopit service MyPhotos and file sharing application Zumo Drive.

The cutesy culture at Google might be coming to an end. The company is finally getting serious by dropping the don’t-blame-us-it’s-only-a-beta label on products that have been around for years. We thought apps like Gmail and Google Docs would be the first to lose the beta label because those are sold to enterprise customers. But Google Finance beat them to it. If you go to Google Finance today, you will see that it has quietly dropped the beta label.

Data from monitoring service StatCounter suggests that Bing, Microsoft’s new search decision engine, has overtaken Yahoo Search as the number two search service in the U.S. and worldwide in large part thanks to stealing market share from leader Google.

The company’s analysis for Thursday finds that in the U.S. Bing overtook Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%, with Yahoo Search currently at 10.22%. For the sake of comparison: Google’s U.S. market share is pegged at 71.47%, and its worldwide share at a whopping 87.62% (vs. 5.62% for Bing and 5.13% for Yahoo).

There she goes again. The Justice Department’s antitrust chief Christine Varney is convinced that tech companies are doing wrong and her underlings are going after them aggressively. She has already given Google notice that she is keeping an eye on them. But now the Justice Department is looking into possible collusion among large tech companies including Apple, Yahoo, and Google for purportedly agreeing “to not actively recruit employees from each other,” according to the NYT.

Yup, that’s a real head scratcher. I guess IBM is not involved in the cabal, since Apple hired way one of its top chip designers, Mark Papermaster, and got into a big lawsuit with IBM over the incident. And Yahoo, nobody would dare steal employees away from Yahoo. That never happens (cough, Microsoft). Or from Google—unless you are Facebook.