Things have been heating up at Yahoo! ever since it hired its new CEO Scott Thompson away from his post at PayPal. Most notably, one of its founders, Jerry Yang, resigned from its board of directors.

More changes are on the way, according to a report by AllThingsD. Four board members are leaving, and two new ones will be brought on board.

In a changing of the guard at the company, Yahoo! chairman Roy Bostock will leave the board along with Vyomesh Joshi, Gary Wilson, and Arthur Kern.

Here is an excerpt of Roy Bostock’s letter to its shareholders:

…the board has concluded that in order to accelerate the Company’s transformation, the combination of a new Chief Executive Officer with an enhanced team of independent directors would provide Yahoo! with the expertise and perspectives necessary to drive innovation and growth going forward. Therefore, Mr. Joshi, Mr. Kern, Mr. Wilson and I have volunteered not to stand for re-election at the next shareholders’ meeting.

While it’s not known who will replace Bostock as chairman, the two new board members will be Fred Amoroso, former Rovi CEO, and Maynard Webb, former CEO of LiveOps.

The future of Yahoo! is very uncertain, with the company cleaning out some deadwood apps and telling us that Yahoo! is now thinking “mobile first”.

Here’s what the company said last month about the new mobile direction:

You can expect to see more new Yahoo! mobile products in 2012, especially in areas ripe for innovation that build on Yahoo!’s strengths, such as companion experiences for TV like IntoNow, new ways to experience personalized media like Livestand, and some of our most popular and useful mobile apps like Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Sportacular and Flickr, which are already being used by millions of people around the world.

Of course, there are still talks of acquisition and Yahoo! is still trying to untangle itself from places like Japan, as we reported just a few weeks ago. The new CEO has quite the road ahead of him, and now he’ll have a new fresh board of directors to move forward with.

On the Yahoo! Search Blog, the company has announced a focus on “mobile first” and the related discontinuation of several of its mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry, citing the fast pace of change in the mobile space. “Our plan is to keep moving, to keep innovating, and to continuously measure and scrutinize what’s working and what isn’t,” says the post, “so we can make room for great new products.”

Here’s the list of apps that will no longer be supported:

• Yahoo! Meme (iPad and iPhone)
• Yahoo! Mim (iPad)
• Yahoo! Answers (Android)
• Yahoo! AppSpot (Android and iPhone)
• Yahoo! Deals (iPhone)
• Yahoo! Finance (BlackBerry)
• Yahoo! Movies (Android)
• Yahoo! News (Android)
• Yahoo! Shopping (iPhone)
• Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search (iPad and iPhone)

Features from certain apps including AppSpot and Sketch-a-Search have been integrated into the main Yahoo! Search app, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see other features from these apps make their way into the search app too.

Despite the end of these apps, Yahoo says it is “moving forward with a ‘mobile first’ mindset.” This echoes comments made by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said in early 2010 that Google would be following a “mobile first” strategy. Schmidt predicted that smartphones would eventually overtake PCs in popularity, and that prediction seems to be coming closer to reality every day, as the popularity and ubiquity of smartphones continues to increase.

Yahoo’s post gives some hints as to where in mobile the company will be focusing this year:

You can expect to see more new Yahoo! mobile products in 2012, especially in areas ripe for innovation that build on Yahoo!’s strengths, such as companion experiences for TV like IntoNow, new ways to experience personalized media like Livestand, and some of our most popular and useful mobile apps like Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Sportacular and Flickr, which are already being used by millions of people around the world.

The company hopes its products will “change the mobile game well beyond Yahoo!”

Since Larry Page took over as CEO at Google, a similar reexamination of priorities and focus has occurred, with many products that don’t fit into Google’s core mission being discontinued or open sourced.

When it comes to searching for things on the web, everyone goes about it in a different way. For example, I still know people who search for “YouTube” on Google instead of typing ‘www.YouTube.com’ into their search bar. Crazy, right?

Data analytics firm Chitika did some interesting research into how many words users type to perform searches on the top five search engines.

The search engines include Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL. Chitika found that Ask.com users tend to type in the most words when searching, while AOL users type the least. The graph below is based on search engine traffic this month from North America.

It’s likely that the wordiness of Ask users are due to the fact that the site wants you to ask questions in natural language format, but this study is interesting none the less.

With most search engines providing auto-completion in their searchbox, it will be interesting to see if the total number of words people perform each search with drops, since the suggestions will override their natural predilection of being verbose.

A new tool from Yahoo! gives you a glimpse of what’s being read on its homepage, as well as what’s popular from the last 24 hours. It’s actually a gorgeous display that lets you see different breakdowns of who’s viewing what, when, and why.

The visualization is a part of its C.O.R.E. project, which Yahoo! explains like this:

The Yahoo! Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.) data visualization reveals the many factors that influence the display of articles appearing in the Yahoo! Today module. Emulating C.O.R.E.’s ability to learn from visitor behaviors and return relevant and appropriate content, this data visualization allows visitors to quickly adjust several different demographic factors, as well as article criteria, to reveal typical reader habits and patterns.

On the backend, Yahoo! is taking many factors into account before it shows you news in its “Today” module, which you’re probably familiar with if you’ve ever visited the site:

According to Yahoo!, C.O.R.E registers more clicks on the Yahoo! homepage than there are words in the entire English language – every ten minutes. This visualization shows you how it’s doing it and what stories are the most popular:

By changing the time-frame sliders, age demographics, and category of news, you can see what stories are being shown on the Yahoo! homepage and how they’re performing in real-time. Also, you’ll notice that little animated dots spin around on the visualization, and they represent a news story. You can click on any of the dots and you’ll be able to see the story, how many views it has, and a breakdown of who has viewed it:

While there’s a lot of data to digest here, the visualization makes it pretty easy for any user to interact with it. This is a tool that I’d love to see from Facebook or Twitter in regards to the activity in my streams. Sifting through links is difficult, and while Twitter is trying to change that with its “Stories’ feature, I’m more of a fan of this graphical and interactive approach from Yahoo!.

➤ Yahoo! C.O.R.E. Visualization

In case you haven’t heard, Yahoo! announced its new CEO today, Scott Thompson. Talk about walking into a storm of acquisition rumors and drama on your first day. Luckily, Thompson was formerly the President at PayPal, so he’s used to sticky situations.

The company says that Thompson will be tasked at focusing on its “core business”, but nobody knows exactly what that is, including Yahoo! What should their core business be? Mobile communities could be potentially lucrative and forward-looking to start.

If I were the new CEO at Yahoo!, I’d give the folks at Instagram a call and make them an offer on the spot.

Here’s why:

1. It could strengthen Flickr

Flickr isn’t “dead”, but it has become extremely stale. In an interesting post today, well-respected blogger and photographer Thomas Hawk wrote an open letter to Scott Thompson, asking him to save Flickr.

One of his best points was:

Flickr represents your *BEST* possible chance for social at Yahoo, but it’s probably too late.

I’m not so sure it’s too late if Yahoo! were to purchase Instagram and bundle it together as the web version of the popular photo sharing community. Not only are you getting a killer service that was Apple’s #1 app last year, you’re grabbing a team that is expanding impressively. With this team of giants, Flickr could be saved and put back on track. See, the Instagram team completely understands social, community, and comprehends how ripe the world of photography is for innovation.

What has happened at Flickr is sad, there are no voices guiding its community and the innovation on the site has come to a complete standstill. The community will eventually move elsewhere if it doesn’t start getting some TLC.

2. Mobile user acquisition

If one bought Instragram, 15 million users come with it. However, it’s not the quantity that makes sense for Yahoo!, it’s the quality of users it could acquire.
Instagram users are share-hungry, and by looking through the popular photos section of the app, it appears to have a strong hold on younger demographics. For example, Kylie Jenner (the youngest of the Kardashian bunch) has such a huge following on the app that it no longer displays her total number of followers:

Fans of people like Jenner and her Kardashian family would be a perfect fit for Yahoo! properties like omg!, which serves as its celebrity news and gossip hub:

While this is only one example of demographic and content matching that Yahoo! could take advantage of by buying Instagram, it’s quite a powerful thought. By working really hard on building out a mobile community, Yahoo! can sprinkle its supporting services in to create more of a well-rounded ecosystem of content-sharing social people. Plus, Flickr saw 78,895 photos from iPhone 4 cameras uploaded to the service yesterday alone, so there’s a strong opportunity to go bigger with mobile.

3. Cut the crap and do one thing really well

Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s very difficult to do a ton of things at once. Just ask Google about how long it has taken to glue all of its services together with Google+. It’s not impossible to stitch services like email and search together, but you must have a core competency that you can fall back on. I would say that having a strong mobile community would be a smart bet for that “one thing”.

While I have no idea if either side has any interest in working together, it would make a whole lot of sense for Yahoo! to double down on social and mobile, and those goals can be gained by acquiring Instagram. The fact that the company already owns Flickr, a once-successful photo sharing network that could benefit from such a deal, is just a cherry on top.

One of Yahoo!’s remaining properties that still has some life in it is photo sharing site Flickr. Dedicated users still post their best photos on the site, providing us with amazing insight into what happened in 2011. It makes us wish that the site never sold to Yahoo! in the first place.

While Instagram has captured the imagination of budding mobile photographers everywhere, Flickr still has some amazing near-professional content on its platform.

Flickr has posted its Year In Photos 2011 which covers everything from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan to the Royal Wedding, and everything in between. All of the photos in the 2011 recap are from Flickr users.

Amazing shots from 2011

Flickr has listed out the top photos from its users and displays them month by month. I would have really liked to have seen a list of most viewed or shared photos from the year as well, as I think that it would give a better idea of what content meant the most to the community.

Regardless, the shots that the site has included are sometimes breathtaking. Here are my three favorites:

Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched in the final mission of the U.S. Space Shuttle program:

Remembering 9/11, ten years later:

Apple fans around the world mourn the loss of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs:

You can see the entire gallery and share your favorites, as well. What will become of Flickr in the future under Yahoo!? Nobody knows, but imagine for a moment what would have happened if the site had stayed independent, and created a really great mobile experience. Apps like Instagram wouldn’t have had a chance to compete.

Sad, really.

Tell us in the comments which moments in 2011 stood out to you the most, and which picture captured that moment perfectly.

➤ Flickr’s Year In Photos 2011

Tonight, during Katie Couric‘s 2011 recap “The Year”, on ABC, IntoNow will be providing a behind-the-scenes experience for those watching the show and using its app on their iPad.

IntoNow, which famously sold to Yahoo! for a song, will provide the platform to allow Couric to give commentary on what went into putting the show together. A live chat with Couric is the main attraction.

Here’s what she had to say about tonight’s immersive experience:

I’m looking forward to giving fans an insider’s look at what went into making #TheYear special via a live chat on IntoNow.

While I’m not sure that Couric’s audience is the type who would use IntoNow for such an experience, it will be interesting to see how it goes. Just a year ago, “live tweeting” during shows was all the rage, and news agencies are still bringing viewer’s tweets into broadcasts. ‘Survivor’ producer Mark Burnett is also getting into the interactive TV act, having just partnered with ACTV8.

Below is the commercial for tonight’s show “The Year with Katie Couric”, which airs at 9PM ET.

➤ IntoNow for iPad

This weekend, some of the best and brightest minds from 25 locations all over the globe will get together for an event called “Random Hacks of Kindness” to collaborate on solving huge global challenges.

Big named companies and organizations like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA, HP, and the World Bank have created this event to invite experts in global issues to collaborate with talented developers and engineers. This year’s hackathon’s attendance should be impressive, according to the venues we spoke with.

Each location is focusing on solving different problems, with San Francisco’s local event taking a look at bicycle commute mapping and emergency drinking water. In San Francisco, Voxeo Labs will be the host. This year, events are being held in cities like Philadelphia, New York, London, Toronto, Tel Aviv, and Zurich. For a full listing of events, check out the Random Hacks of Kindness site.

In recent years, Random Hacks of Kindness events have made an impact on social good by turning out mapping tools to report bushfires, apps to connect food stamp recipients with sources of fresh produce, and visualization tools around landslide risks.

Johnny Diggz, Chief Technology Evangelist for Tropo and founder of Geeks Without Bounds says about “RHoK”:

When disaster strikes, more than ever, people need to communicate and we are excited to see RHoK developers use Tropo to help in crisis situations.

Tropo is a service similar to Twilio, which lets you embed calling and texting features into your own app. Imagine the possibilities for disaster related communications utilizing that technology.

This weekend during Random Hacks of Kindness, some of those possibilities and ideas will become actual working applications thanks to thousands of developers and thought-leaders worldwide.

➤ Random Hacks of Kindness

Copying and pasting is something we all do. Sometimes it’s for ourselves, but when we’re on the web we’re probably copying and pasting things to share with friends. Links, photos, and text get copied and pasted every day into emails, IM’s, Twitter, Facebook, and more.

Clipboard, a web app created by Gary Flake, previously founded Microsoft’s Live Labs, Yahoo Research, and Overture Research. It’s safe to say that Clipboard is built based on the needs of web surfers everywhere.

Instead of copying and pasting, Clipboard gives you a simple bookmarklet for your browser that will let you select a full element of a web page to save and share with whomever you like. It’s simple and seamless to do, and doesn’t feel as clunky as services who only save and share links like Delicious. You’re definitely going to want to sign up.

Here is a video from the company explaining Clipboard:

We talked with Clipboard’s founder Gary Flake about what makes Clipboard so different:

TNW: Please talk about your experience with Microsoft’s Live Labs, Yahoo Research, and Overture Research, and what you’ve learned about browser interaction on the web.

Gary Flake: In each of my three previous jobs I was hired to build teams that could create new opportunities, but outside of traditional structure and processes of the business. At Overture Research, we focused on low-level technology to help improve our overall economics (i.e., earn more money per search and per click). At Yahoo! Research, we tried to identify changes to existing products that could elicit an actual shift in the strategic landscape (e.g., make search less commercial or shift advertising to an options framework). And at Live Labs, we looked for new user experiences that could fundamentally change how people interacted with the Web (e.g., zoomable UIs).

In each case, browser interaction is absolutely fundamental to what you can and can’t do within any of these problem domains. For example, paid search works because the user’s intent in a query is a much stronger signal of intent than viewing a page. We also know that algorithmic Web search is complicated by the fact that users aren’t tolerant of having many more controls beyond a search box. Worse still, many users don’t have a clear mental model of what separates a browser from a Web page.

The most important lesson for me – and the one that is a bit humbling – is that understanding browser interaction is really, really hard. It’s hard because it touches on technology, business strategy, and user experiences, and you can’t even begin to understand the implications of these issues until you start thinking about all of these issues as different aspects of something more fundamental.

TNW: What in your experience told you that copying and pasting just wasn’t getting it done and needed innovation?

Gary Flake: The Web is over twenty years old and there is still no way to bring to together two search results from two different sources. The state-of-the-art for saving something from the Web is comically complicated: highlight content, hit CTRL/CMD-C, change into another application like an email or text editor, hit CTRL/CMD-V, hit save or send, then switch back to where you were when you started. Could this be any more complicated?

To add insult to injury, if you copy things in this way, you’ll usually end up with something that has little resemblance to the source, has lost some key functionality, and is hard to share.

What we really need is a way to save things that retains the visuals and functionality, but is also portable and shareable. The fact that nothing existed with all of these properties inspired me to create Clipboard.

TNW: Is Clipboard something that moms and dads and nongeeks are able to figure out? The worst part of sharing on the web for my parents is there are too many steps for them. Did you build this with those folks in mind?

Gary Flake: I think Clipboard can work for non-technologists and I absolutely had that sort of user in mind when I designed it. And for what it’s worth, my parents are regular Clipboard users today. The biggest hurdle has been to help people get the bookmarklet installed (what we call the “Clipper”). After that, it’s pretty easy because saving is as easy as two steps (launch then click).

We also default clips to be private instead of public because we have this sort of user in mind first and foremost.

To give you a little more context, before we came out of stealth mode, I sort of cryptically and cheekily described Clipboard as “social media with a purpose”. What I meant by that description is that a lot of services today (like social networks) work great for the tech savvy, but are leaving behind many others. With Clipboard, I am hoping to build something that appeals to those that are left behind by more typical social media. And to do that, we focused on the simplicity and utility of the experience above all else.

TNW: What other types of environments do you think Clipboard would work in, are there any mobile plans as of yet?

Gary Flake: Mobile will certainly need to be a priority for us in the not-too-distant future. We had to get the Web service solid first, but we’ll gradually start to increase the surface area of Clipboard in time.

Because copy/paste is such a ubiquitous need, I am especially interested in seeing how we can connect it not just to our own scenarios, but to those of other developers as well.

TNW: What sites do you personally clip from the most?

Gary Flake: As you can imagine, I clip a lot of stuff. For myself, I tend to clip things that I need to remember but would otherwise forget, such as the obscure technical tip form Hacker News or the Google search results that took me an hour of research to find.

My wife and I clip a lot of things that pertain to our home life, and this includes everything from shopping, stuff for the kids, ideas for activities, etc. Clipboard lets us share these clips privately, so we get something like a private workspace out of it. In truth, I think the top site that I clip from while in this mode is Amazon.

But the clips that I publish to the Clipboard feeds page are the things that I think others may like. This could be the occasional YouTube video or TED talk, but could also be something funny or weird that I saw on Reddit.

Taking a clip of a web page and sharing

When you grab a piece of a web page with Clipboard, you’re not taking a screenshot. You’re taking an actual element from a page and saving it. A perfect example is The Next Web’s Facebook page widget that you see on the right hand side of our pages.

With Clipboard, you can just click a page element, and it is saved completely intact. All links work, and all images are in place.

After you’ve clipped an element with Clipboard, you can add tags, @ mentions, and any annotation that you like. At this time you can choose to publish your clip publicly or just save it to your own Clipboard dashboard. If you make your clip public, all of the hashtags and notes become searchable and discoverable by the rest of the Clipboard community.

This is a really smart design and service with a whole host of potential usages. If you see a great flash game, you can clip it and share it without having to copy and paste a link or embed it on your own site. If you’re a designer or developer and see a lightbox that you really like, you could share that with your team instantly using Clipboard. No view source and copy and paste needed.

Your Clipboard home and browsing clips

All of the clips you’ve taken using Clipboard are stored on a very well designed dashboard that you can view in tile or list format. Once you’ve taken and saved a clip, you can add annotations, switch it from private to public and vice versa, as well as share it via Facebook, Twitter, email, or an embed on your site or blog.

If you’d like to find elements found from around the web that others have shared, Clipboard makes it simple to do by searching for things you’re interested in. The keywords that you have used on your own clips are even stored for easy clicking and searching later.

You can sign up for Clipboard here to start clipping and sharing everything you see online.

Innovation is coming from all angles in the application world, and an area ripe for that innovation is calendars and scheduling. We have to-do apps, and Apple’s core calendar and reminder apps, but nothing really ties communications into reminder apps. Other players in the space are natural language calendaring apps like Fantastical.

TouchBase, created by app developer tomo wants to let you enter in all of the information about your meetings and not worry about entering in contact information or addresses. The company calls the app a “day planner”.

Making your calendar social

The goal of TouchBase is to turn meeting requests into a more social and communicative experience. For example, with TouchBase, once you arrive at a meeting, you can tap one button to let everyone know that you’ve arrived. Or you could send them an SMS saying you’re running late, again with one tap.

Since the app matches people’s names with your contacts, you can even give people a call with one touch, and without searching through your contacts. This is key, because when you’re late for a meeting, you’re usually either driving, running down the street, or waiting for a train or bus. You don’t really have time to look up a name, tap it, then tap call or message.

All calendars in one place

The other major strength of TouchBase is tying all of your calendar systems together, including Google Calendars, Apple’s own Calendar, as well as Exchange and Outlook into one place. This alone makes using TouchBase worth the 99 cents the company is charging.

The app isn’t without some issues though, as syncing speed and reliability depends on the service that you’re using. Apple’s built-in service is the most reliable since it’s local, but services like Yahoo! take a bit to sync, and can skip a cycle. If you’re not someone who has a calendar full of meetings and calls, it shouldn’t be an issue for you.