Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, tragically died today from an apparent heart attack. Whatever you thought of the guy, you can't deny his incredible influence on music over the last thirty years, and it's sad to see him go so soon. Many of my friends have spent the day enjoying a few of his greatest hits in his honor -- I'm joining in by putting together a playlist of a few of his videos and running them in another tab. Blah blah blah it's really easy to put together playlists in Y! Music, there's drag and drop editing, etc. Regardless of the Y! Coolness of the feature, it's nice to be able to queue up a few more moonwalks in remembrance. RIP!

I haven't used YQL nearly enough, and I'll need to do some sort of nice overview post at some point to make amends for the general lack of coverage. But there's only 4 minutes left in the day, which does not give us time for an actual interesting, comprehensive post! Instead, you get a feature!

For instance, did you know that, using YQL, you can parse through HTML on any webpage? As per the example given in the console, the following query will pull out the top headlines related to YHOO from Yahoo! Finance.

select href,content from html where url="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=yhoo" and xpath='//div[@id="yfi_headlines"]/div[2]/ul/li/a'

And from there, you can generate a nice XML (or JSON) formatted request running through the YQL APIs that you can interact with almost like a real webservice for whatever fun application you've put together.

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20href%2Ccontent%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Ffinance.yahoo.com%2Fq%3Fs%3Dyhoo%22%20and%20xpath%3D%27%2F%2Fdiv[%40id%3D%22yfi_headlines%22]%2Fdiv[2]%2Ful%2Fli%2Fa%27&format=xml

Because if you're going to be page-scraping a site, you might as well do it right!

I am continually amazed by the sophistication expressed by browser bookmarklets these days -- there's almost nothing you can't do with a moderately short Javascript function embedded in a button, apparently. A particularly awesome example (Yahoo!-related, of course -- that's why we write about it) is the Search site bookmarklet, developed by Stoyan Stefanov. Drag the actual bookmarklet to your toolbar, and what do you get? A fancy new search box dropped into the page that performs site searches within the domain using BOSS. And it autocompletes for you, too. It seems so easy that I'm surprised that there are any sites out there wouldn't have an internal search box -- but then again, now that I have this bookmarklet, I don't really care whether they do or not.

Pro tip: Save a bookmarklet as your home page for easy application on any page you visit, without needing to take up a bookmark slot!

I'm not a heavy toolbar user -- the Awesome Bar in Firefox has only reinforced my penchant for typing out URLs (I just don't need to type out the entire thing any more) and if I need a built-in search box, I'll probably use the built-in search box that, you know, is already included with my browser (after flipping it to Yahoo!, at least). Still, I can appreciate some of the awesome things that the Yahoo! Toolbar team has done with their new Toolbar, which you can read more about over at Yodel Anecdotal. A quick high-level:

• While you could always pull in Inquisitor as a standalone browser extension, it's great to have it included some of the technology by default in the Yahoo! Toolbar and exposed to the masses who might not be savvy enough to extend their browser on their own. I've noticed that it doesn't automatically preview the top results, but it'll at least keep track of sites that you've recently visited.
• PLUS, it adds in the ability to quickly port your query over to more specific search engines. Flickr and Wikipedia are enabled by default, but you can add your own shortcut as long as there's an appropriate query URL, like "http://ycoolthing.com/?s=<TERM>". You can also use this as a poor man's version of Yahoo! Shortcuts, with the added benefit that you don't need to be logged in to Yahoo! -- for instance, I've set up an SVN "search engine" to jump over to the file that I "search" for in our web SVN repository: "http://svn.blah.com/view/properties/sports/trunk/<TERM>". On top of this, you can customize the keyboard shortcut that you use to kick off your custom search engine, so it just feels pretty badass all around.
• If you use Yahoo! Bookmarks or the IE version of the toolbar, the search box will also hunt through your bookmarks and list any ones that seem relevant to your search, saving you the trouble of needing to navigate through the Bookmarks menu.
• Instead of mere buttons to link you over to random URLs, Yahoo! Toolbar has added "Apps" that you can install to instantly preview interesting information. My Sports App will tell me the scores of my favorites teams, my Mail App will expand out a little window for my inbox, my Buzz App will show me the most recent buzzy stories. It's a bit hard to tell which Apps have fancy preview windows and which just provide a dropdown menu, but the ones with the fancy preview windows are really handy.
• Of course, if you just want to get a button that links to some site that you like, you can add that in as a Custom App and choose an appopriately adorable icon.

All in all, the new Yahoo! Toolbar is packed with a ton of interesting features and has almost convinced me to leave the thing installed, which is high praise given my standard browser habits.

This is another announcement that's a few weeks old but is still new over in Y! Cool Thing land -- My Yahoo! is becoming way more Open. We talked about Open Apps when they were first announced back in December, and the general idea is the same, except we're just farther along now. *grin* There are new apps for tracking your finances, wine pairings, blogging, games, et cetera. You can also tell that the application platform is becoming more mature -- there's a nice destination page to keep track of all of the apps for which you've signed up, for instance, and the canvas pages seem a bit more interesting now. We're obviously still pretty early on, as you can tell by the still limited selection of apps that we're exposing, but it definitely feels like we're picking up steam.

I'm sure that record companies shudder to hear this, but YouTube has become an awesome place to listen to music online. It's pretty much guaranteed that if there's a moderately popular song that you like, someone else has already uploaded the official music video, or added a lyrics track, or used it as the background music for their artsy animated film -- instead of having to hunt down the track to download yourself, you can whet your aural appetite just by entering a search request.

Oh, yeah, and there's probably a bunch of legal use cases, too.

Regardless, given YouTube's utility towards listening to music, it only makes sense that FoxyTunes has added in support for controlling YouTube videos from your toolbar. It works perfectly fine for managing a single video, but really shines when you load up a playlist. For instance, I recently watched Wicked and, embarrassing though it may be, I sometimes get a hankering for listening to some quality musical numbers. I can just load a video in an appropriate playlist in another tab, and then go about my work in my other tabs while pretending that the YouTube playlist is just any other collection of songs that I can jump around between (or mute when anyone I'm trying to impress walks by!).  It's certainly significantly easier than having to jump back to the tab whenever you need to skip around (though you can do that pretty easily, too, just by clicking the "YouTube" button in the tray) and is a great overall addition to FoxyTunes. Upgrade to the latest version (latest meaning as of May 14th...as you know, I missed a few updates) to try it out!

I love that Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, has been broadcasting his show from Iraq over the past week, touring with the USO to bring a bit of laughter to the US troops that assuredly don't usually have much of an opportunity for that sort of thing. All told, I think we can declare "Mission Accomplished" with Operation Iraqi Stephen.

I also love that this has given me the opportunity to dress up my avatar as Esteban Colberto.

Okay, the more important takeaway is that Yahoo! Avatars has partnerted with DonorsChoose to promote a "Support Our Troops" charity drive, encouraging people to donate to support public schools attended by the children of military families. The fact that the drive has raised over $140,000 dollars (and hopefully the Yahoo! promotion has helped with that) to help thousands of schools in thousands of little ways definitely earns a Tip of the Hat from me.

Aren't you tired of all of those MP3's that you've been listening to on your iPod? I mean, where's the variety? You've only got a couple thousand songs that you illicitly acquired from the Internet (thanks, Internet), and that's got to get old fast. Now, radio, that's the stuff! Endless excitement as you try to guess which of the five popular mainstream singles they plan to play next. You would just go back to carrying around a radio-enabled boombox over your shoulder, but it lacks a certain design ethic and general expensiveness that you've grown accustomed to.

Luckily, Yahoo! Music brings radio to your iPod Touch (or iPhone) with their new Y! Music App, which hooks you up to your favorite LAUNCHcast and CBS Radio stations in an elegant, rounded-cornered package. One of the features I found most interesting was the clever skip counter, which notifies you right on top of the skip button about how many more times you can use it in the next hour -- apparently there are some DMCA rules about how you're allowed to listen to radio that I had not heard about, but this seems like a nice way to deal with it. Otherwise, it's got all of the station-related social and geographic features that you could want -- the ability to share stations with friends or find which stations are located near you, for instance -- plus a nice purple background. Fulfill all of those musical needs where listening to songs on your iPod before just wouldn't cut it.

Since it was announced that Yahoo! 360 was closing its doors, people have been complaining that the proposed replacement, in the form of Yahoo! Profiles, didn't fulfill their blogging needs. Which was a legitimate complaint, one that I even shared, because I wanted to blog with Yahoo! and I wasn't able to...until now!*

The new Blog that comes with Yahoo! profiles is a straightforward little thing, mostly a place for you to dump rich-text-edited thoughts in relation to your primary public-facing Yahoo! page. It's not complex but it doesn't really need to be -- you've got your blog entries, you've got a place to see all of 'em, you've got comment boxes attached to 'em, and you can display them front and center by dragging the module around your profile. If you decide that you'd like to keep your insightful commentary and/or pictures of your cat a bit more private, there are plenty of hooks for controlling those settings. There are still a few little annoyances -- a few too many steps to insert images, for instance, since you need to set up external hosting, and no great central location for viewing all of your entries (aside from the View All link, which isn't linked from within each blog post) -- but it gets the job done and will undoubtedly improve with time.

I've heard a lot about using blogging to give yourself a better profile online, but thanks to Yahoo! Profiles for flipping it around and giving us back an online blog at all.

* Well, I mean, until now, since we got rid of that last product that let you blog with Yahoo!.

Have we hit 4 weeks without an update yet? Can we call it Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Month? :D

For any regular readers -- do we have those over here? -- I again apologize for the hiatus. Blogging is a nasty habit, in the sense that it's easy to drop and hard to pick up, like cocaine on opposite day. I'll do my best to keep up, because there are always fun things going on at Yahoo! that I'd like to talk about, but just be forewarned that I may drop off the face of the earth at any point. If that happens, be consoled by the fact that it's not y(ah)ou, it's me.

But we've got to start light as I ease back from the dead, so let's skip all of the interesting announcements and go with the most inconsequential feature I can think of. Hooray!

The "Save For Later" feature in Yahoo! Local is handy -- without disrupting your navigation of a set of results, you can flag any of the entries for easy access later. One of the slightly trickier problems is figuring out exactly where you're supposed to easily access it, though.

Hint: the popup tells you that it'll go to your My Local tab.
Even More Subtle Hint: once you click okay to save the entry, a faint outline of a rectangle will fly up from the "Save For Later" button over to the "My Local" tab, drawing your eyes to your probable next destination.

The same behavior exists on the My Local page, where saving an item to a collection, for example, will animate a trail over to the My Collections link, calling attention to it on the left sidebar. It's mostly just a cute little graphical feature, but it also does help teach you, in a very gentle way, how to get where you want to go. Also, it's fun! Oooh. Animation. Almost distracting enough to keep me from writing a post tomorrow.