Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Well, when it rains it pours around here. (In my case, about an hour and a half after publish time)

We'll get to the MyBlogLog API Closed Beta announcement soon and a bit more on the Blog Remixer tool the music guys just released, but today's big news is that Yahoo! is becoming an OpenID publisher, and it's easy to get started adding it to your apps.

Wait, wasn't Flickr doing that?

Yep, and so is the rest of the company.

Mind you, we're still just publishing credentials and not yet consuming them, but it does mean that anyone with a Yahoo! account now has an OpenID account, and does start the path toward some very interesting times ahead.

So, by now a number of you know about the fact that we've offered you the opportunity to tell us what's wrong with the businesses we list in Y!Local, and a bunch of you have. (Thank you, by the way.) Still, it can be a little annoying to do a search on something, get a list of results and not know which places could be closed without opening up the listing.

Yeah, we feel your pain.

So now, if you do a search for businesses in Yahoo! Local, we'll tell you which places may be closed in the search results.

Obviously, you probably still want to call ahead to make sure, but hopefully that should help you decide faster.

Oh yeah, and if you've got any other good ideas you want to share, we're all ears.

Ever get excited to go somewhere only to find out it's closed? Or knowing that there's a great restaurant a few blocks away that nobody seems to know about? Heck, I can attest to getting a yen for some good barbeque and accidentally walking into a coffee shop on one occasion.

We all make mistakes. What's worse is not having a way to get them fixed.

Well, now Yahoo! Local has a way for you to help keep things up-to-date.

As of yesterday, if you go to any listing on Y!Local, you'll see an "Edit this listing" link. That will bring up a little menu asking if you want to edit something or claim it if you own the business. Simply fix what's wrong on the form, send it on in, and we'll let other folks know.

Hopefully, it's pretty straight forward.

Just so you know, Y!Local gets data from lots and lots of sources, some good, some bad. Hopefully, you'll help us keep more of the good stuff and help us chuck out the bad.

So, thanks in advance!

Today would've drawn a blank, almost. Folks were perhaps busy doing hacks or recovering from the hack fever. That's when I thought of talking about Yahoo! Widgets, "the coolest thing Yahoo! did in recent times" (in a non-yahoo friend's words). It's a nice platform on which 1000s of little thingies have been built by developers. Those widgets do just about everything you'd want them to do on a desktop. Just go download them and check the weather, your mails, or watch a random slideshow from flickr.

Want more? You could write one using simple XML and some JavaScript. It's as easy as writing a config file. I'm not kidding. Just to find out myself, I wrote up a widget that displays random couplets from Thirukkural, written by the ancient Tamil poet/philosopher Thiruvalluvar, along with English translations by G.U. Pope. It took me just a couple of hours. (That I missed the evening cab drop is a different issue, though.) You can download the Kural widget (also here) and mail me any bouquets or brickbats. Just install the widget engine from http://widgets.yahoo.com/download/ before that. A screenshot's here.