• by March 2, 2005

You gotta love those wild and crazy Yahooligans. Last night, the purple team packed the Shubert theatre in New York with marketers, agency folks, the media, and its own people for a performance of "SpamAlot," a new Broadway musical currently in previews. It was a night of campy hijinks, puerile parody, and bawdy humor - the show is based on the raunchy and raucous film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

The sets were amazing, the costumes colorful, the accents fun; in short, it was a romp. Now the Minute cannot confess to sidesplitting laughter, but we can attest to hearing gut-busting belly laughs emanating from the row behind us. Perhaps they drowned out our "ha-has."

Those Yahoos at Yahoo!... Well, they work 24/7, put on special events like last night's, and we wonder if they get any sleep at all. Jerry Yang, co-founder, chief Yahoo, and director, attended a pre-show reception, as did most of our favorite Yahoos. We understand that the Yahoo! Search team also threw a party in New York, toasting the 10th birthday of the company and hosting people who attended the Search Engine Strategies conference.

And if that's not enough, they're giving all of us, (at least the ones who register and have free Yahoo! e-mail accounts), a free scoop of ice cream from Baskin-Robbins to celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th birthday. All the Minute had to do was go to the Yahoo! home page and click on the ice cream cone, and boom - we were linked to a page that sent us to a coupon. But before you can get to the coupon, those clever Yahoos asked the Minute for our Yahoo! ID and password. Anyone who's not an existing user, is asked to sign up for My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, Auctions, Messenger, Chat, Games, and "Much More."

But there's more. Yahoo! cleverly integrates Yahoo! Local functions to help people find the closest Baskin-Robbins scoop shop. The coupon is only good for today, so the addresses were helpful if you are as hell-bent as the Minute is, to redeem your scoop. There are driving directions and maps as well. And, to drive home all the offers, the company links users to video highlights of its 10 years on the Web. Very cool indeed. Each little square in its patchwork video quilt is a milestone and insight into Web history. There's even a hokey picture of Steve Case hugging Jerry Levin at the time of the AOL Time Warner merger.

This is great fun.

Happy Birthday Yahoo! And for the yodel, "Yahoooooooooooooooooooooooo." (Sorry, no musical accompaniment).