Yahoo! Inc. [YHOO] kept putting on the brave face of a solidly independent company -- and not one facing a hostile takeover -- on Thursday when its chief technology officer Aristotle Balogh addressed the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and described grand plans to "literally rewire Yahoo! from the inside out."

In a shift from the usual conversation about the company's advertising business, Balogh (pictured) focused on Yahoo!'s overall design and its new attempts to better integrate all its different services while also addressing the growing popularity of social networks. The changes he described included making all of Yahoo!'s different services more portable within the site so that users can better customize their start pages with their favorite applications, and making use of a social graph to help rank contacts so that e-mails might be prioritized accordingly. Under the new plans, individual users would have more control over privacy settings, deciding what information they wanted to share and with whom.