The founder of bookmarking service Delicious, Joshua Schachter, plans to follow several other executives out the door at Yahoo.

When Yahoo was on a bit of a spending spree for social media-type startups, Delicious represented one of several companies on Yahoo’s shopping list. Delicious offers a social bookmarking service, where people can keep and share the links they find interesting.

The site’s continued development will happen without its founder, as Schachter intends to leave Yahoo. Several Yahoo executives left or plan on leaving Yahoo before their annual meeting takes place on August 1st.

TechCrunch learned from Schachter of his impending departure. “The development of the new version of delicious seems to have almost stalled within Yahoo, and Joshua cited recent frustrations with the process as playing a part in his resignation,” said TechCrunch.

Schachter has no current plans for other projects, unlike other high profile departures like Jeremy Zawodny and Vish Makhijani. Both men have new jobs awaiting them in their post-Yahoo lives.

Delicious continues on as well. The Delicious blog announced the release of its add-on for Internet Explorer. An add-on for Firefox has been available for quite a while, and this gives Delicious the potential to be a fixture on a lot more browsers than it is today.

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Starting Thursday, Yahoo will allow its customers to create e-mail accounts using the ymail and rocketmail domain names.

With 266 million active users, it’s pretty tough for newbies to get the personalized Yahoo! Mail account name of their choice. Yahoo just made it easier, however, by adding the possibility of using the ymail and rocketmail domain names.

Longtime Internet denizens will recognize the latter as the original e-mail domain used by the company Four11, which Yahoo acquired in 1997. And ymail will be familiar to users of the company’s mobile service, Yahoo! Mobile, as that’s what appears on the login screen.

Accounts created with the new domain names will use the same Yahoo! Mail interfaces and get unlimited storage at no charge. Localized country versions of the domain will also be available. The ID’s will also work for signing in to other Yahoo sites and services, such as Flickr, and Yahoo! Messenger.

As part of the launch, Yahoo will auction off special e-mail addresses, the proceeds of which will be donated to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Ocean Conservancy, The Point Foundation, Right to Play and World Wildlife Fund. The auction will run from today until June 30, and can be found at www.ebay.com/ymail.

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Photo sharing site Flickr is one of the leading lights of Yahoo - but cofounders (and husband/wife team) Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield won’t be around to keep driving the product forward. They are both joining the mass exodus of executives from the company.

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Rather than having security escort all of Yahoo’s current board off the premises, some major Yahoo investors think there’s room for a mix of old and new directors running the show.

The potential bloodbath anticipated when Yahoo’s annual meeting takes place, setting up a hostile proxy fight for control of the company, may end up being nothing more than a thumb-wrestling match. If Carl Icahn really spoiled for a brawl, he might not get it.

Some investors want to mix and match Yahoo’s current board with some of Icahn’s nominees. The Wall Street Journal said one unnamed major shareholder could back fewer nominees to Yahoo’s board.

Another activist investor, Eric Jackson, suggested a slate of 5 Yahoo directors and 4 new ones as a compromise to a full proxy fight.

Jackson said he’s been looking for change at Yahoo’s board since January 2007.

By pushing four new directors onto the board, Jackson reasons this will avoid triggering a change of control provision, where Yahoo employees could walk away from the company with a generous compensation package.

Given the choice, Jackson would toss out current chairman Roy Bostock, whom he blames for failing to come to terms with Microsoft. “He supposedly has much more experience in such deal-making matters than Yang, and I find it puzzling that he would choose not to attend that fateful May 3 meeting in Seattle, which led to Microsoft finally pulling the plug on its offer,” Jackson said of Bostock.

Yahoo gained a little respite, as the Journal noted the suit brought by a pair of Detroit pension funds won’t receive an accelerated trial. The Detroit complaint won’t be heard before Yahoo’s annual meeting happens on August 1.

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The Carl Icahn side of the Yahoo chess match suffered a set back after a Delaware judge refused to grant an expedited trial to decide whether CEO Jerry Yang and board chairman Roy Bostock should be held financially responsible for blocking a Microsoft acquisition and for designing a so-called “poison pill” to jack up the cost of an acquisition.

Hostile investors led by Icahn pushed for an early court date to decide the case in advance of the annual shareholders meeting on August 1. Along with a declaration that Yang and Bostock had ignored their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, the suit seeks to invalidate Yahoo’s employee retention plan, which detractors called a severance plan or poison pill upping the cost of acquisition by as much as $2.4 billion.

The plan takes effect irrevocably in the event of a new board, a proxy fight which Icahn has begun and is likely to win, and/or in the event of a Microsoft acquisition. The retention plan offers generous severance and benefits if an employee loses his job or resigns for “good reason,” a caveat Icahn thought much too vague.

All of these matters, what won’t be settled at the meeting anyway, will be settled afterward in court, it seems.

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Internet media firm Yahoo Inc said on Tuesday that its mobile search service will be offered by six more telecom companies in Asia.

It now has 60 such partnerships worldwide, including with Mahanagar Telephon Nigam (MTNL) in India, Hong CSL Limited, Smart Communications and Digital Mobile Phlis (Sun Cellular) in the Philippines and Vibo Telecom in Taiwan. “We are now able to reach 600 million subscribers,” David Ko, Asia managing director and vice president of Yahoo’s mobile division, told reporters at a media briefing.

“This creates the scale to make mobile advertising attractive.”

He said the mobile advertising market is expected to rise to $16.2 billion in 2011 up from $1.5 billion in 2006 and that Yahoo “would obviously love to take a large chunk of that pie.”

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June 12th is known as Princess Gwenllian’s Day, Lover’s Day, and Independence Day in various countries. And we’re ready to call this Run From Yahoo Like It’s On Fire Week, as yet another important employee is leaving.

Dr. Usama Fayyad, like Jeff Weiner before him, served as part of Yahoo’s 15-member management team. His exact job title was “Chief Data Officer and Executive Vice President, Research & Strategic Data Solutions,” and his previous employers include DMX Group, Microsoft, and NASA.

Owen Thomas reports that Fayyad may return to that second company; if so, this would add both insult and injury to injury. It’s bad enough, after all, that Fayyad, Weiner, Jeremy Zawodny, and J.R. Conlin would leave Yahoo around the same time. For one of them to go to a direct competitor must really hurt.

Meanwhile, as a result of any number of developments, Yahoo’s stock went down by about ten percent today. Which might, in turn, encourage still more employees to leave before Friday wraps up. Who do you have to talk to get a week named?

Ah, well. Yahoo supposedly has a search partnership with Google in the works, so there could be a bit of good news for the company yet.

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Under the deal, as Google’s announcement today describes it, Yahoo will become a carrier of AdSense-driven contextual ads not only within its own search pages, but also optionally for other services that it hosts. But Yahoo will continue to provide the search functionality — it is not sublicensing Google’s search to substitute for its own, or making any kind of a deal that passes control of Yahoo Search over to Google.

In a corporate blog post this afternoon, Google Senior VP Omid Kordestani wrote, “We are proud of the advertising technologies we have built, which show users a relevant ad whether they are searching for a specific item or browsing the internet. This arrangement extends those benefits to Yahoo and its many users, advertisers and publisher partners. We currently provide similar services to sites like AOL and Ask.com as well as many other partners, and we work closely with all of our partners to ensure that our partnership drives their long term success.”Kordestani went on to make certain points very clear. In boldface type, he wrote, “This is not a merger.” The deal is limited to enabling Google ads to appear on Yahoo search and Yahoo-hosted sites, as well as an agreement between both companies to make their instant messaging services interoperable.

Also with a boldface heading, he added, “This does not remove a competitor from the playing field. Yahoo will remain in the business of search and content advertising, which gives the company a continued incentive to keep improving and innovating. Even during this agreement, Yahoo can use our technology as much or as little as it chooses.” He went on to say Google’s share of search traffic will not increase under this deal — a key concern of regulators — since it’s still Yahoo’s engine that’s providing the search for Yahoo’s pages.

Speaking on behalf of her company this afternoon, Yahoo President Susan Decker wrote, “This agreement provides a source of funds to both deliver financial value to stockholders from search monetization and to invest in our broader strategy to transform display advertising and advance our starting point objectives with users. It enhances competition by promoting our ability to compete in the marketplace where we are especially well positioned: in the convergence of search and display.”

Yahoo’s statement spelled out the terms of the deal: It will run for four years initially, with the option of extending it to ten years in two- or three-year renewal intervals. It only affects Yahoo Web properties in the US and Canada.

“Advertisers will continue to pay Yahoo directly for clicks served by Yahoo from Yahoo’s Panama and Content Match marketplaces,” today’s Yahoo statement reads. “Advertisers will pay Google directly for each click on Google paid search results appearing on Yahoo owned and operated network or certain affiliate sites. Google will share a percentage of such revenue with Yahoo.”

BetaNews tests Thursday afternoon did not immediately reveal Google AdSense-driven contextual ads along Yahoo search results just yet.

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Yahoo opened the beta test of SearchScan in several countries to help safeguard people against potentially dangerous links in their search results. Searchers may notice something different about the search results in Yahoo. The company partnered with security vendor McAfee, which runs the SiteAdvisor service, to power a new feature called SearchScan. “While SearchScan will be on by default, users have control over how they use the feature,” said the Yahoo Search blog. “In preferences, users can choose to turn the feature off or choose to filter out all sites with warnings from their search results.” SearchScan compares links with an index of ones it has checked for possible problems, like browser exploits, unsafe downloads, or just the likelihood the site spams visitors who give it an email address. McAfee said its site ratings are based on automated safety tests of websites, and include feedback from volunteer reviewers and its analysts. Yahoo’s Vish Makhijani, SVP & GM for their search engine, noted on the official Yahoo blog how they are the only search site providing this type of advance warning today. People will see these warnings appear in red with the listing SearchScan flags. SearchScan should be of great benefit to people whose less than perfect spelling leads them to mistype a query, which could return a link or two that direct people to a dangerous website. Some scammers register incorrectly spelled domains in the hopes of bringing in visitors who hit a wrong letter or two. Other search sites may want to consider similar initiatives. Google for one has been vexed for months with SEO poisoning attacks that drop links to infected pages into its listings. Their work with StopBadware.org doesn’t seem to notice these links, and that’s not good for visitors.

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Searching the web could help save the planet from global warming according to a new ‘green’ search engine initiative being launched today in New Zealand and 13 other countries.

Sydney-based ecocho says it will sponsor the growth of up to two trees for every 1000 searches users conduct on Yahoo and Google at no cost to the user.

To achieve this, the company has struck a deal with the search giants to direct advertising revenue to ecocho according to searches made through the ecocho search engine that uses Google and Yahoo! The search results are the same as on Google and Yahoo!, except the Ecocho logo is displayed above the results.

To join the scheme, users download an ecocho toolbar, selecting either Yahoo! or Google, and make ecocho their search engine.

Founder of ecocho, Tim Macdonald says that in New Zealand alone, web users conduct close to 120 million internet searches each month. “If we could capture just 1 per cent of that traffic, we would make a significant contribution towards lowering the impact of harmful greenhouse gas emissions.”

“ecocho.co.nz is a free service that doesn’t alter or slow your search results, plus users can choose between technology they know and trust, Yahoo and Google,” Macdonald says.

According to its website FAQ page, Ecocho generates funds through advertising, which is used to buy carbon offset credits, which in turn contributes cash to carbon dioxide emission offset initiatives.

Initially, Ecocho will plant trees in New South Wales, Australia, because it is close to the Ecocho headquarters and the NSW GGAS scheme was the first local government mandatory emissions scheme in the world.

Purchases through the New South Wales Government Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme (GGAS) will be monitored by KPMG, which will check the acquisition, registration and retirement of the carbon credits.

A similar scheme in New Zealand is currently being investigated with one option being a tie up with Landcare.

Each of the 14 nations involved will have its own national ecocho country domain, such .ca for Canada, com/de for Germany and so on, and local representatives will strike deals with carbon offset and/or forestry schemes. In New Zealand, the local representative is Creo Sustain.

“ecocho.co.nz aims to reinvest 70 per cent of the site’s revenue in forestry schemes, and as the site progresses, we’ll begin to support similar carbon-offsetting schemes in other states and countries,” Macdonald says.

To find out more or download the ecocho toolbar, visit www.ecocho.co.nz

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