Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

"The print page is dead". Put your hands together for in-context printing built with "wysiwyg" in mind. Yahoo! India Maps print page just became better, faster and a lot cleaner. Visit Yahoo! India Maps at http://in.maps.yahoo.com, search for say "100 feet road, indiranagar, Bangalore to lido mall" and click on the "print" link in the left hand corner.

A helpful pop up shows the number of sheets you will need to print. The Map is also in wide screen (landscape), so what you see is indeed what gets printed. The Printout also gives useful tips on the distance, approximate time taken and local auto rickshaw fare, all of which will aid you in making sure you pay only what you need to pay to that friendly Auto driver (If you end up in India).

Just that Simple.
Subramanyan Guhan
Yahoo! India Maps Team.

In India, Just like our people, vehicles are of various types. We have all the kinds of them known to mankind running on our roads and each one of them is as important as the other. I would even think there are more (motor)bikes, scooters and cycles than cars on Indian roads.

Now, let me build a hypothesis on top of that previous statement. Arguably, The same person travelling between the same two given places may take a different route depending on the kind of vehicle he is on. I, for one, prefer the side roads (gallis) and small roads that are less polluted and less crowded over main roads when I am on a motorbike. I am willing to ride a few hundred meters extra if I can skip a few junctions/signals which are a big bottleneck on traffic speeds. But when I am in a car, I would rather stick to the main roads because the condition of side roads are unpredictable. Plus, you never know if that big gravel truck is parked blocking the entire street. But, whenever I take the cycle, I really want to avoid main roads completely if possible, because, they are simply not safe.

There are very many ways to get to a place. Sometimes, you want to take the fastest route, Sometimes the shortest. But the kind of vehicle never used to play a part. But, now it does. At Yahoo! India Maps Search for a route and watch out for buttons on the right pane. Now Obviously, the single Search Box knows about all of this too. So, Type in "bike from anna flyover to parrys, chennai" and you get your (motor)bike directions. Or would you rather prefer a cycle around? Try "Cycle from Domlur bus stand to Yahoo egl Bangalore". Choose the one that fits you well and drive safe.

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.