A new service called Yahoo Pulse will one-up Google Buzz by offering privacy tools and integration with Facebook news feeds on the Yahoo home page, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Pulse site will behave a bit like Threadsy or the desktop appTweetDeck, aggregating real-time updates from Facebook alongside other social networks.

Yahoo has been trying for months to make itself the ultimate starting page for Internet users; you can already view your Facebook and Twitter feeds using Yahoo’s “Quick View” feature, but Yahoo Pulse will provide an improved, tabbed interface and offer new kinds of integrations in Yahoo and Yahoo Mail.

Notably, Yahoo Pulse will have a privacy menu that will apply to multiple services. That feature will be an important draw for some users, given that Facebook has dealt with a big privacy backlash in recent weeks. Just don’t expect it to add completely new privacy features to your Facebook account.

The privacy angle is also pertinent when you consider that Google — Yahoo’s chief rival — made some major privacy errors that greatly hindered the launch of Google Buzz, a very similar service. Those faux pas and the lack of Facebook integration prevented Buzz from becoming a killer application. Pulse is Yahoo’s answer to Buzz; maybe it learned from its rival’s mistakes.

The specifics of the new interface and integrations have not yet been revealed, but it’s all expected to launch within a few days. We’re curious to hear what kinds of integrations with Facebook Yahoo users would like to see, so let us know in the comments.

Today, Yahoo is releasing a new service: Firehose, a real-time, searchable index of social content aggregated from around the web.

Accessible via YQL, Yahoo’s SQL-like query language, the Firehose will gather data from status updates, user ratings and reviews, comment threads, Google Buzz, Flickr,Delicious, Twitter, YouTube, Last.fm and a range of other sites and apps, as well. The Firehose is part of Yahoo’s family of Social APIs, a suite that includes APIs for contacts/directories as well as update/status data.

This announcement follows Yahoo’s recent integration with Twitter and is part of the company’s ongoing commitment to developers as well as its social media strategy, which seems to revolve around aggregating content and leveraging existing networks and APIs rather than reinventing the wheel à la Google Buzz.

YQL allows developers to access, update and mash up data from across the social web — any data source that uses open tables is fair game. With Firehose, developers can query for keywords, data from a specific web app, data in any given language or from a certain location, data on status changes or data about a given URL. Being able to easily grab and combine data from multiple sources is something that’s been an exciting part of Yahoo’s developer initiatives for a while and will likely continue to be part of the company’s strategy when it comes to web applications.

“The realtime web could be called the modern equivalent of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, organically guiding the web marketplace based on the seemingly chaotic click choices of millions of users,” wrote Yahoo Developer Platforms PM and UX Manager Micah Laaker in an e-mail today. “We believe the Updates Firehose will provide the tools necessary for [developers] to make structure and sense out of such an activity stream.”