Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Having spent the last three hours watching the incredible Olympics opening ceremony, I can't help but plug a few more Olympics related products. While I don't have a phone that can enjoy it, the Mobile Olympics site is still fun to look at in a browser. Presumably your iPhone will prove to be a better venue. If you're like me and aren't willing to spend $70+ on a data plan, you can still get in on the fun through My Yahoo! -- the module they put together is really impressive. Not as impressive as a mass of Chinese volunteers operating an undulating grid of blocks, but pretty good nonetheless.

MyBlogLog has done a lot of awesome things with fostering blog communities, but the most visible feature, tracking the users who have visited a page, has always puzzled me a bit. Do I, as a blog reader, really want to carry around all of these identifying cookies just so I can get my icon added to the list of recent viewers? It's interesting for other readers and the blog owner, certainly, but maybe I'm not that selfless about giving to the community.

The new Just For You widget speaks to my more selfish motivations. Now I have a reason to broadcast to the blogosphere who I am -- they can use that information to help find other stories on that site that I might be interested in (based on my stated interests through MyBlogLog) and explicitly call those to my attention in a pretty little module. It's a tiny bit invasive, I suppose, but it's also useful, which offsets a lot of those sticky privacy issues. As long as you're going around and being a good netizen, you might as well get something out of it.

Contrary to what Monty Python would have you believe, you can definitely have too much spam. Every time that I have to scan through the pages of poorly titled, grammatically inconsistent email messages that end up in my spam folder -- or, worse yet, my inbox -- I start to think that maybe the vikings wouldn't be all that bad as an alternative. As the most heavily used web email service out there, Yahoo! Mail consequently attracts the most spam, too, and has legions of spam-fighting robots (or computer scientists, maybe) doing their best to keep you and spam as far apart as possible. Still, you might be curious how you can actively help to make sure your inbox stays clean, so it's great that the Mail guys have gone ahead and hosted an open workshop with our Anti-Spam Czar to get all your spammy questions answered. There's a lot of good advice about what is or isn't helpful in avoiding spam -- use the Mark as Spam button! -- and it's an interesting read about why our anti-spam technology works the way it does and where we're going from here. Certainly not out for a breakfast of spam, egg, sausage and spam, if we can help it.

The Olympics are nearly upon us, a fact that is not lost on my coworkers, who'll be working through the night monitoring the Yahoo! Sports Summer Olympics site, verifying results, and generally kicking butt. Good luck, guys! The site features a fresh new look, detailed results for all the athletes, sports, and countries that you can think of, a rockin' new trivia game, and a customizable Watchlist that you can use to keep an eye on the particular subjects that interest you. There are tons of nice little touches, too -- autocomplete search broken out by category, quicklink mouseovers for Watchlist stories, a deluge of interesting blog posts, et cetera. If you're interested in the Olympics, Yahoo! Sports is the place to be.

Coincidentally, getting there is even easier thanks to some excellent Yahoo! Search integration. The presentation of medals on the results page is just about as inspiring as the presentation of medals in real life, and the overview results have the nice touch of popping the featured video into a lightbox. To round out the offering, there will be search shortcuts for players and sports rolled out over the next few days. Maybe it used to be a marathon to find quality Olympics coverage -- we've turned it down to table tennis for you. Enjoy!

Common knowledge states that we only yodel over here, but our talents aren't limited to our voices. Check out this cute and (for me) heartwarming video over at Yodel Anecdotal, produced with Matt Harding of wherethehellismatt.com fame. Despite the endless excitement that's been the past year, Yahoos can still break it down on the dance floor.

When SearchMonkey first rolled out, it already came with a set of default applications installed, but they were all for owned-and-operated properties -- Flickr, Y! Video, etc. That was bound to change as we've transitioned into this new, open, best-content-wins era, and today's the big day. The excellent applications from Yelp and LinkedIn (as well as Yahoo! Local) will now show up by default for all Yahoo! Search users, giving them that fresh Enhanced Result taste without needing to install a thing. This fits in really well with the news about the enhanced news results from a little while ago, as users can now expect to have all sorts of little gems of enhancedness scattered throughout their results. Also, it's a strong incentive for sites to put out good SearchMonkey Enhanced Results -- if they gain enough traction as installed applications, then there's a chance they'll get turned on by default for everyone.

Huzzah! The long rumored Delicious 2.0 has launched to great fanfare, and yea, there was much rejoicing. Flying pigs world-wide stretch their wings. I would provide more insightful commentary (ha, like that ever happens), but I'm still playing around with it. Luckily, the guys and gals behind the curtain have got this one covered.

In the immortal words of Michael Arrington, "YAY!"

I can't imagine why the redesign took so long; it just zooms by in the video.

The search engine cuil launched with great fanfare earlier this week and...well, landed shortly afterwards. Swept up in the moment and wanting to demonstrate the simplicity of building new search applications on top of Yahoo! BOSS, Sam Pullara invented...Yuil.

Image credit to Amnesia

Taking the cuil frontend design and hooking it into Yahoo!'s search results took some indeterminate but presumably short period of hacking and resulted in a whole new search engine that a majority of commenters noted as being faster and more relevant than the $33-million-backed original. Sadly, Yuil was taken down, presumably due to the copyright and trademark issues (but aren't parodies protected? Maybe not if they work better than the source material...), but it will always have a special place in our hearts as a timely demonstration about how easy, effective, and hilarious Yahoo! BOSS applications can be.

My favorite: "Searching enough web pages"

EDIT: If you're curious, Yuil has been relaunched as 4hoursearch.

After MyBlogLog spruced up their widget, it only made sense that they'd spread the makeover love to their main site. Everything looks clean and new, with the rounded corners and gradients that we've come to expect, and I can still find all the things that need finding, so, hey, seems like a pretty good update! I actually can't even remember what it used to look like. It's that good.

Yahoo! Music Unlimited is finally shuttering the windows and locking up the doors, making way for the mass exodus over to Rhapsody's greener (financially?) pastures. While I'll miss Y!MU terribly, there are some perks -- we keep the same subscription price for the first year if we follow the official account migration, Rhapsody has a larger catalog and offers MP3 downloads, and I've heard good things about the Rhapsody player and the overall experience. I haven't made the switch yet, but I'm optimistic about it (aside from the increased price, but again, I'll have a year over which to evaluate whether it's worth it).

One unfortunate side effect of shutting down that branch of Yahoo! Music is that they would need to close down the licensing servers as well, meaning that any DRM-laden music files that you had purchased through Y!MU would become unplayable once your system settings changed enough to invalidate the license. Sure, you could burn the songs to a CD and rip them back, but it's a hassle, sound quality suffers, etc. This is why DRM is a terrible, terrible thing and I'm overjoyed that we're getting out of that business, but having us "brick" music that you had rightfully purchased is significantly less joy-inducing.

Obviously, that's not the cool thing. The cool thing is that the Yahoo! Music folk changed their mind. After hearing pretty significant public outcry over the prospect of entire music libraries being silenced, they re-evaluated their decision and offered up the following solutions:

• Full refunds on any purchased songs that would have died due to DRM.
• Investigation into replacing DRM-"protected" songs with glorious MP3s if desired.

Those are good options for the consumer, even if my first thought was, "Wow, that's gonna cost the company." Heck, it's even more impressive given that thought. So even though we had a misstep out of the gates, I'm proud that Yahoo! Music ended up putting back some of the "right" that's been missing from "digital rights management".