Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

I can't tell exactly when this happened, but I'm pretty sure that the Neighbors feature of Yahoo! Local at some point was expanded to all the rest of those neighborhoods out there (not just San Carlos and Sacramento, which had been the initial beta sites). I'm still working on getting a handle on how I'd use this product, but as of right now, it at least seems like an interesting starting point if you want to make any general suggestions or start up some discussion that pertains to your immediate region. The suggestions feature works a lot like our feedback pages, letting you vote suggestions up or down or add your own, and the discussion portion is basically like your standard message board, just tied to where you live. I've yet to figure out if I really care enough about my community to get involved in the minutiae of beautification projects and coffee shop recommendations, but then again, I was compelled to contribute a comment about Salsa dancing in Mountain View when I saw a related post go by, and maybe others will feel the same.

With so many users visiting Yahoo! News, the News team has access to tons of interesting data points from which they can determine popularity. On their Most Popular page (er, by which I mean, the page containing all of the popular stories, not the page on their site that, for instance, would have been voted Prom King), they can tell you which stories are getting the most views, which photos have been emailed around the most, what people are recommending to their friends, et cetera. One kind of neat thing is that they can also tell you all of those things for yesterday, or the day before, or a week ago, via the Archive module towards the bottom of the page. So if you've been busy at work and need to catch up on all of the top stories from Wednesday, the Most Popular Archive from Sept. 3rd is here for you. Sadly, it looks like there's only a month worth of pages available, but it's still a cool way to leaf through a few slices of time.

As I'm sure you've heard, BOSS is our fantastic search webservices platform that gives you a flexible and powerful interface through which you can Build your Own Search Service, hence the name. BuildaSearch is a new application that allows you to build your own search service, built on top of BOSS, which...er, as we've stated...is designed to do exactly that. It's like a WYSIWYG editor for BOSS, I suppose? Frankly, I just hope that there's a market here for me to develop the some sort of highly customizable template to generate inputs into the BuildaSearch interface, which could then render a new personalized BOSS-based search engine. "BuildaBuildaSearch", I'm thinking. Has a nice ring to it.

Check out the Y! Search blog for a few search engines built on top of BOSS that are slightly less meta.

With the release of Google's new highly-performant Chrome browser, it remains clear that there's a massive amount of investment behind Javascript-based applications. So it's neat that we still have one of the best Javascript libraries available on the web. Of course, the best way to demonstrate the power of the browser? Remakes of classic arcade games. Waka waka waka.

There's always room for one more Flickr-related post! I've always thought that the concept of using machine tags in Flickr to associate photos to other chunks of structured data is really neat and super effective, as evinced internally by groups like Upcoming. I'd never paid much attention, though, to the fact that a bunch of external companies do the same thing. Last.fm, for instance, has excellent support for tagging Flickr photos with Last.fm concert IDs to add your photos to that concert's page. Flickr, the thoughtful folk that they are, returned the favor by introducing customized icons and fancy linkage for Last.fm tagged photos, completing the two-way integration and really improving the experience on both ends -- it's great to see us working in concert with other cool companies.

...is Open Hack Day! Internal hack days have been going strong, but there's nothing quite as cool as inviting external developers to our campus to geek out, eat pizza, play Guitar Hero, and come up with awesome projects using our APIs that we're too unimaginative or busy or close to the products to come up with on our own. We might not have Beck this year, but it should still be an awesome time. Read more about it at the YUI Blog.

This is just plain silly (and awesome) -- Jacob Seidelin created a Flickr photo browser modeled after a level of Wolfenstein 3D. That's the magic of having an open and easily consumable API: motivated and creative users will do all of the hard work for you. Sure, you may have never realized that you needed a way to merge your love of classic video games with your desire to look at pictures of puppies, but they'll get it done anyway.

Blast from the past! Here are some other Flickr tools.

I've got a MapMixer t-shirt, but it's hard to tell what else quantifiable has come out of the project. Not saying that it's not a super-cool idea and implementation, but that's sort of the problem -- I haven't seen it really getting integrated anywhere else across the network, and that's a shame.

As usual, Flickr comes charging to the rescue! I can't exactly tell if it's the same technology, but Flickr's custom tiling is at least a close spiritual successor. For big events like the Burning Man (previous link) or the Beijing Olympics, which are magnets for interesting geotagged photos but which take place in locales for which we don't have exceptional map coverage, the Flickr team can overlay Creative Commons licensed maps and add those critical visual cues to make it simple for users to place photos at the right spot. Again, I don't know how it's done on the backend, but it's still hugely gratifying to see such a good mapping idea finally getting into the mix.

After my own disappointing finish in a Guitar Hero competition, it's nice to read about a couple of other Yahoos managing to take home some hardware. Foosball is a cultural phenomenon at Yahoo!, and I'm sure our Yahoo! Search team was salivating when they heard that the Search Engine Strategies conference would be hosting a foosball tournament, pitting all of the big names in search against each other in the only competition that matters (pfft, global reach, whatever). The dynamic duo of Jake Rosenberg and Daniel Wong were unchallenged on their way to a gold medal finish over both Google and Microsoft, which when paired with our award for top search result relevance just goes to show that we've got that whole work/play balance down cold over here.

You may also recognize Daniel and Jake from the finals of the 2006 Foosapalooza, where we raised over $10,000 to donate to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Charitable work and search market dominance through foosball -- sounds like a winning plan to me!

It's seems like it's just about every week that I'm writing about Flickr releasing a new version of their slideshows, so, you know, it helps to keep things on schedule. This time, the slideshows are embeddable, and will play videos! In full screen, if you want! Hooray!