MediaFile

Yahoo opened the doors to the bunker on Wednesday, inviting reporters to its San Francisco outpost even as the company faces a barrage of questions about its future.

The event was to unveil a couple of new product announcements from Yahoo’s Flickr division, the 50-person photo-sharing product group based in San Francisco’s financial district.

The Flickr folks unveiled the official Flickr app for Android smartphones, with features such as built-in photo filters to spiff up pictures and various social networking capabilities. The other new product is called “photo session,” a real-time collaboration tool that allows groups of friends to flip through and play with online photo albums together in their Web browsers.

Yahoo executives outlined the company’s focus on mobile and social as a core part of it strategy going forward, promising an “accelerated pace of mobile offerings” and touting Yahoo’s ability to leverage what it referred to as users’ “interest graph” (which it distinguished from the “social graph” that Facebook controls and the “information graph” that Google dominates).

The elephant in the room however was the uncertain future of Yahoo, which fired Chief Executive Carol Bartz earlier this month and has retained investment bank Allen & Co as it undergoes a “strategic review” that many observers think will lead to the company’s break-up or sale.

Apple isn’t going out of its way to publicize the problem, but the Sydney Morning Herald has reported that cracked Macbooks are troubling users. Underscoring that, a Flickr site carries pictures of more than 200 cracked Macs, posted by the owners, along with their commentary.

Apple spokesman Bill Evans invited users with problems to bring them to Apple.

“Any user who has an issue with their Macbook should contact AppleCare for support, even if it is out of warranty,” he said of the problem, which dates back to at least 2006 and is still angering consumers.

Apple won’t say if they have upgraded the plastic that cracks, how many Macs they have fixed or if they expect more troubles as the aging plastic splinters.  Although the problem is notorious in old machines, users say it has also appeared in machines that are less than a year old. A British website, The Inquirer, reported earlier this year that Apple will repair the problem for out-of-warranty Macs at no charge.  Users like this one on the Flickr site also said the machines were repaired at no charge.