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“How much kindness is there in the world?” I asked myself one morning as I showered (my best inner-monologues take place in the shower). “Can it be measured? Does it change hour by hour? Season to season? City to city?”

“Every day,” I thought, while shampooing, “people send one another IMs, text messages, emails, comment on each other’s MySpace profiles, and write on each other’s Facebook walls, leaving affirmations of friendship, love, and support. It’s disorganized now, but let’s try to channel, visualize, and measure it.”

The Apps Studio team agreed that this was a pretty cool idea, and thus was born Vibes (an application initially for Facebook). We describe Vibes as a social experiment tracking the flow of kindness across the world. Have a friend with the flu? A brother or sister with a big job interview tomorrow? Or do you just want to let someone know you're thinking of them? Send them some good vibes, and watch in real time as people across the world share their kindness.

The Apps Studio is a small, new tiger team committed to building best-in-class social applications for Yahoo!, sometimes extending existing Yahoo! services and sometimes creating entirely new ones (like Vibes). When my mom used to cook, her guiding principal was “everything’s better with cheese.” When the Apps Studio cooks up new apps, our guiding principal is “everything’s better with friends.”

We are very excited by the recent advances in social application platforms and the types of new online experiences they allow. Our goal is to bring your favorite Yahoo! products to you and your friends, wherever you all may be.

So, we hope you’ll check out Vibes and send a few to your friends. Stay tuned for more from our team.

P.S. At the time of this writing L.A. and S.F. seem to be the kindest cities. East Coast, consider that a challenge.

Scuba diving aftermath photo by Delgoff.

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