Yahoo just reported its earnings at 11 cents a share for the 3rd quarter, ahead of Wall Street’s projections for 8 cents a share – if that means absolutely nothing to you, know this, it’s good. Yahoo’s stock has shot up over 10% now in after-hours trading.

More importantly, Yahoo’s CEO laid out 3 very straight-forward goals for the company going forward:

1) “to become the starting point for the most consumers on the Internet”
2) “to be the ‘must buy’ for the most advertisers”
3) “and to deliver open, industry-leading platforms that attract the most developers”

How and if they’re able to accomplish those goals obviously remains to be seen, but in my opinion they have taken some pretty solid steps recently – most notably with the update to their main search page.

And while the buzz around their new social network, Mash, has seemed to subside since its launch about a month ago, Jerry Yang has been spotted coming and going from Facebook, so there’s always that…