Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

So, let's go ahead and pretend that I haven't failed to update for three weeks. *sheepish*

The search box has evolved into an amazing thing over the years, as Internet users have become reliant on it to resolve their every need. You ask it about a location, it'll find you a map. You mention a package's tracking number, it'll tell you where it is. You can make small talk with it about your favorite movies and favorite athletes.

And now? Like that annoying friend of yours, it'll be sure to mention in the loudest way possible when you're misspelling words.

Sure, Search Assist has a pretty smug look on its face afterwards, but at least it's saving you an unnecessary click.

I don't personally have a Twitter account -- you might say that with all of this Tweet-mania, I've simply been watching from the sideline. This is easier for me to do now that I've been introduced to the aptly named Sideline, the product of an internal Yahoo! hack, which provides a slick interface for keeping up with Twitter trends and following particular subjects that interest you. The application is build on top of Adobe AIR, meaning there's an extra download/install process in there, but once you have that set up, it becomes ridiculously easy to pick out a couple of search keywords and comb through vast fields of 140-character messages to see what people are thinking on those topics. Sideline also saves all of these search groups for later, so you can always have the most up-to-date chatter on subjects that you care about close at hand. Maybe it's not as cool as getting into the fray yourself (I mean, even Oprah is doing it!), but a seat on the Sideline is a good enough substitute for me.

It is an age old question, one that we can finally answer thanks to Flickr Trends, a cool little app put together using the Flickr API:

"Which is photographed more often, Pirates or Ninjas?"

Trick question. Ninjas cannot be photographed.

If you happened to celebrate it, I hope you had a very happy Easter over the weekend! Of course, while Easter isn't for everyone, Easter eggs are something that we all can get behind. Nicki over at Yodel Anecdotal was nice enough to collect together some of the best Easter eggs from across the Yahoo! sites, most of which I'd seen before but a couple that still managed to surprise. The one that I enjoyed most was the revelation that 'tis always the season for snow over on Flickr, regardless of which holiday you might be in the middle of. It joins the exploding photos in the Organizr and the ho ho ho hats as one more of the many reasons why Flickr is truly eggstraordinary.

See, it's an ironic title, because there's finally a version of Yahoo! Messenger that you can take on the go. The iPhone version of Yahoo! Messenger seems to do all of the things you'd want from a mobile messenging app -- lets you send messages, receive messages, overuse emoticons, etc -- but also has a ton of nice little touches like integrated status updates and photo sharing. The icing on the cake is the fact that you can use the Yahoo! Messenger SMS capabilities to get free outgoing and incoming text messages from your phone, although given how much you're paying for an iPhone data plan already, maybe that's not too critical. Definitely check out the demonstration video over at the Messenger blog, and get a move on downloading it today.

Yahoo! Music has reopened its shiny, new, updated doors, and good gosh, it looks awesome. There's almost too much to cover, which is great, because it means that I can spread it over a couple posts -- two, three, or four birds with one Rolling Stone, if you will.

The centerpiece of this redesign, the new Artist page, deserves its own post regardless. As Michael Spiegelman eloquently covers in his previously linked blog post, the main focus of this refresh is to give the user more choice, whether it's about how they see their music site or even what they see on their music site. There are so many excellent music resources on the web -- Last.fm and Pandora, the Amazon music store, YouTube for illicit music videos or maybe even Yahoo! Music for licensed ones (heh, okay, fine, also the Live Sets, which are pretty sweet) -- and you should be allowed to remix them however you want through Yahoo!. So when you're looking at your favorite musician and want to see their videos from YouTube, go ahead and add that module -- play the video inline, too. Swap out the iTunes module for albums on Amazon, because who wants DRM anyway? Your custom layout will follow you around to all of the artist pages across the site, meaning you'll get the experience you want, exactly how you want it.

It can be hard to jump around the web to collect all of the different ways to appreciate your favorite music, and now you barely have to try. That's satisfying.

For a while, it's been standard operating procedure for image search engines across the web to link off to a result page for each image that displayed a bit of random detail about the specified image at the top of the page and iframed the source page beneath that. It made a lot of sense, given that the image you were looking for could be hidden at any random location on the page, but it wasn't particularly exciting.

The best way to make things more exciting? Give them a darker background, of course, and the new Image Result pages have got that in spades. But what, you want more than mere design improvements? Fine. I guess you'll need to be satisfied with the easy access to your original search results, or larger image thumbnail, or ability to navigate to other image results from the same query without reloading the page, or the inclusion of fun related images in case you want to go exploring. My only complaint is that the included source page is a bit compressed now, but with such a useful frame, who needs the rest of the picture?

While our internal April Fool's Day message from our CEO was way more hilarious, I'm glad that we also entered the public fray by releasing Ideological Search, the premier search engine for finding political opinions just like yours. Ironically, Ideological Search, which lets you filter search results based on whether they lean left or right, works well, looks great, and is actually a really interesting application of BOSS search technologies. I'd almost hope that we keep it around post-April 1st. Go ahead and check it out here!

I've always loved the University Hack Day program, and you really can't get a better feel for the experience than by reading about Brandon "Qwazie" Kwaselow and his adventures at the Michigan HackU event. He hacked the entire night on his project, an iPhone application to explore points of interest from our WhereOnEarth database (and even an API layer on top of that to add your own), and was rewarded with fabulous prizes, a silly hat, and an eventual trip out here to the main campus to show off his hack to all of us Yahoos. The overall event got some nice press from the school newspaper and some of the Yahoo! employees who went out to help even got to experience the excitement of watching Michigan win their first round matchup in the NCAA tournament, which I totally called on my bracket, by the way. Congrats to Brandon for winning this University Hack Day and good luck to all the participants in future iterations!

Whenever we watch television in my house, we inevitably end up with a fleet of laptops parked on our sofas. Not that there isn't quality TV content out there, but the flow of information is torrential enough on the web that there always seems to be some snippet of data that we need to stay on top of, and there's plenty of downtime during the commercial breaks, or in our case, by the grace of DVR, the opportunities to abuse the fast-forward button.

If for no other reason than that my lap is getting really warm, it would be great to cut out the middleman. That seems to be the main thrust of our Yahoo! TV Widgets initiative, which brings the massive utility and convenience of Yahoo! Widgets directly to the medium-sized screen. For now, it requires a special TV to run, but more sets with Widget support are rolling out the door this summer. Check out the video below for a preview of what technical marvels might be rolling into your door if you try it out.