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On Monday, Yahoo will begin the weeklong roll out of the new My Yahoo to users in all markets. The start page service is graduating from the much-coveted beta status, and integrating improvements made over the last several months like new and third-party content modules, a streamlined header, and advertising that’s not as in-your-face as previous iterations. (See full list of updates below.)

The move paves the way for Yahoo’s open-platform strategy, which was announced in late April. It lets developers create widgets that work on other Yahoo properties and OpenSocial in the hopes of expanding how and where content can be used.

All My Yahoo users should have the new version of by July 14.

From the release:

Custom-designed modules with more of great content from select publishers (such as New York Times, People, Wall Street Journal, etc.)

New and improved Yahoo! modules, including Top Picks from Your Page, Flickr, Note to Self, To Do List, Movie Showtimes, Scoreboard, Stock Portfolios, TV Listings, Calendar, Yahoo! Buzz, etc.

New modules that provide access to third-party services (i.e., Netflix, Gmail, POP mail, Facebook)

New header with easier customization tools for adding content and choosing options, as well as tabbed browsing for multiple pages

More control, with additional page layout options, a less intrusive advertising approach, and easy drag-and-drop functionality

My Yahoo graduating beta, adding new features

If you’re at work and your co-workers won’t stop chatting, there are two options: either tell them to go talk elsewhere or get a good pair of earplugs and/or headphones. If you’ve gone for the latter and can’t seem to get over the concentration hump of focusing with music blaring, there’s SimplyNoise, a white noise generator that runs right in your browser.

I’ve had a white noise loop kicking around on my iPod for years, and it doubles as a great way to get in the zone for napping. In SimplyNoise’s case, you can dial in how much noise you want with a simple volume slider that’s independent of your system volume. This works great in theory, but managed to crash my browser nearly every time I messed around with the slider, so your mileage may vary.

If you’re looking to get a similar white noise experience on your computer, there’s also a standalone player over on Download.com.

[via Delicious]

You can adjust the white noise slider from 1-100 percent. The higher you go, the louder it gets, so be careful.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Tune out co-workers, other sounds with SimplyNoise

Say you just captured an amazing video of your cat doing something funny. It’s time to upload it to YouTube right? Why stop there? Hey!Spead, a service from the folks at Particles has just been updated this morning to take the video you just captured and push it out to nearly 20 different video hosts at once.

Better yet, it keeps track of the views once they’re there. You can view each video with daily stats analytics, view breakdowns, and comparison charts to see how the same video is doing on different services. It’ll also let you compare it to other videos (even if they’re not yours) to see how the two compare.

In case you’re already entrenched in YouTube there’s a built-in tool called YouClone that will let you copy all your videos off YouTube and post them to other services without having to track down the original. All you need is your YouTube password and it will do the rest.

The service is not free, and uses a credit system that charges one to three $.05 credits per video uploaded, transferred, watermarked and tracked. If you’re a videographer looking to get a video out there it’s not a bad deal when you think about how much your time is worth. If you’re a cheapskate like me, there’s also a free video stat tracking service called TubeMogul that will do the tracking without the small fee. As for uploading to the rest of the services though, you’re on your own.

Hey!Spread - Video Distributing Web Service from Bruno Celeste on Vimeo.

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Send your viral video to 20 different video hosts with Hey!Spread

Say you just captured an amazing video of your cat doing something funny. It’s time to upload it to YouTube right? Why stop there? HeySpread, a service from the folks at Particles was just updated Thursday morning to take the video you just captured and push it out to nearly 20 different video hosts at once.

Better yet, it keeps track of the views once they’re there. You can view each video with daily-stats analytics, view breakdowns, and comparison charts to see how the same video is doing on different services. It’ll also let you compare it with other videos (even if they’re not yours).

In case you’re already entrenched in YouTube, a built-in tool called YouClone will let you copy all your videos off YouTube and post them to other services without having to track down the original. All you need is your YouTube password and it will do the rest.

The service is not free, and uses a credit system that charges one to three 5 cent credits per video uploaded, transferred, watermarked, and tracked. If you’re a videographer looking to get a video out there it’s not a bad deal when you think about how much your time is worth.

If you’re a cheapskate like me, there’s also a free video stat-tracking service called TubeMogul that will do the tracking without the small fee. As for uploading to the rest of the services, though, you’re on your own.

Hey!Spread - Video Distributing Web Service from Bruno Celeste on Vimeo.

Source:
Send your viral video to 20 different video hosts with HeySpread

This morning video chat tool Tokbox has quietly slipped in a new feature called public feed which lets anyone with a Web cam leave a message for others on the service to reply to. Up until now the service has been mainly a P2P chat service between people who know one another, but this new feature is turning it into a social network for budding Web cam enthusiasts.

Tokbox's new public feed lets you post out a message to the entire community there.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Seesmic, another video start-up, has had this as its main feature up until recently where it’s gone towards blog owners to get them to use its video recording and threading for video comments.

One thing that seperates this new feature from Seesmic’s is that your replies don’t show up underneath other people’s videos. You can reply to anyone’s public video directly, and even call that person but others won’t see your response, making the conversation a little one-sided. Still, it’s a nice addition to viewing what other people are up to without instigating a live chat with them, and I can see publicized replies being added later on down the line.

The feature goes hand-in-hand with another people-finding tool that was recently introduced. If you’re friends with another Tokbox user you two share similar friends, it’ll pull up a listing of “people you may know” the same way Facebook does.

The service also recently introduced AIM and MSN integration, so you’ll be able to pull in your buddy list from either of those services and chat with your buddies on the service’s Webtop. Facebook chat users have also not been left out in the dark, as the company quietly released a Firefox plugin yesterday that lets you add video chat to Facebook’s chat service. Once installed you get a new option in FB chat to send someone a video chat request which will send them a link to a special Tokbox room where both of you can talk without leaving the page.

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Tokbox going after Seesmic with public video posting