Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

It's like jazz. If you have to explain the appeal of a service like mixd, you'll never get it.

For those not in the know: take one part IRC, one part Y!Groups, a few dashes of IM, mix and serve chilled on your phone. Very cool for groups of folks to keep in touch without having to constantly remember to send that text to paul.

(Ok, semi-funny true story. One of the engineers who worked on this told me about it about an hour after it launched. I see what it is, get fairly excited because I get how cool this is, and ask if I can blog about it. He tells me "No, it's not quite ready for full time. It's only US right now because they're still working on getting all the wireless folks in line." Not fifteen minutes later, I'm sitting in a meeting scanning blogs and see it show up on Jeremy's linkblog. Cat, meet bag, hey! wait! come back here cat!)

A few things to note:

• It's still very much in beta, so PLEASE be sure to use that feedback link.
• There are some things you can only do from SMS (e.g. change your nickname). If you want to be a cheap bugger, here's the help text you get:
  

  Cmds: New <mixername>: create new Mixer.
  Add <nickname or phone#>: add people to a Mixer.
  Whisper <nickname or phone#> : send private msg.
  Mute: stop messages from the Mixer.
  Leave: leave the Mixer.
  Stop all: stop all messages
  Ignore <nick or phone#>: stop messages from that user
  Friends: list your friends
  Who: list Mixer members
  List: list my Mixers
  Kick <nick or phone#>: Kick user from mixer
  Nick <nickname>: Change ur nickname

  Yes, the use of 133t is justified here. "Nick" is an example of one of the "only available via SMS commands" that has yet to make it onto the web interface.

• If your carrier isn't working yet, it should be soon. I know it works with Sprint (which surprised some of the folks that are working on it), Cingular Blue, Verison, and a few others. Obviously you also want a plan that's fairly generous with the SMS messages ;). All carriers should be supported (there may be a few minor issues with T*mobile, but they're being worked on.)

A few additional points. The Mixer originator (Mix master?) has to have a Y!ID, but folks in the mixer don't. You simply add them and they show up. One other nice point is that those folks phone numbers aren't exposed to the other folks. Others just see their nickname. VERY COOL PRIVACY!

Still damn cool and pretty useful.

Sometimes, you'll run across a cool thing online that you just need to share with a particular someone. Maybe it's a hilarious picture, or a ridiculous video, or just anything that you know that special person will especially enjoy. There are lots of ways to get the word out already --- IMs, emails, carrier pigeon --- but in case you want another, try the del.icio.us links for you. Essentially, if you know someone's del.icio.us username, just tag the link with for:username and it'll show up in their links for you list, which they can browse through at their leisure.

I wouldn't say that doing it this way is particularly better or easier than shooting off an IM (if they're online), writing an email, or attaching a rolled parchment to the leg of a bird with an abnormally well-developed sense of direction, but it's very simple if you're already tagging links with del.icio.us. Also, you don't really need to know the other person that well, aside from having their username. For instance, if you run across any cool things happening on Yahoo! sites, feel free to hit me up at for:seanm514!

I've been reading a few of the other Y!Blogs (over on the right), and one that caught my interest was a post on the Y!Berkeley Research Blog. It's interesting to consider the names of places and things that people determine, often they can be different than what you expect. I think that's the most curious thing about the whole tagging phenomenon. It's the additive bits of information that you can provide that eventually form the whole of what folks are thinking. I also appreciate what the folks over at the sports blog have suggested and frankly, it reminds me that I have to go pester folks in Y!Local to make those individually applied tags searchable. Yes, there's the very real chance for abuse, but it's just the right thing to do, and frankly, there's an easy solution to that problem as well.

Still, if you want to do a search for public tags, there's a bit of URL Hackery you can do (as I mention in the Y! Sports Blog) comments.

To do it, you have to take advantage of a bug feature in the Y!Local search setup. If you enter something like:
http://local.yahoo.com/results?tags=1&stx=sports+bar&csz=sunnyvale+ca
You'll get all the items marked with "sports bar" in Sunnyvale CA. (The "csz" stands for "CityStateZip".) If you set csz to something unresolvable like http://local.yahoo.com/results?tags=1&stx=sports+bar&csz=xyz You'll get ALL the publicly tagged "sports bar" items.

As for "public" vs. "your" tags, the tags currently have to go through moderation to prevent lawyers from showing up. Any tag you provide has the chance at becoming a public tag, so feel free to tag whatever you like in Local however you want to.

Meanwhile, I'll try to work on the other folks in Local to lighten up and make the tag search bug feature a bit less hidden.

Unless you're in the UK, you probably haven't seen the Email of Champions promo.

Just to prove that "yes, it's cool, but we know need to make it faster" there's even a quick jab at ourselves with the Pre-loading text. Still, if you're in the UK and interested in getting a finger sweatband (nope, not making that up), g'won and check it out.

Hope all of you are having a fantastic Thanksgiving out there (or a fantastic November 23rd, if you aren't American or don't celebrate Thanksgiving)! I'm sure you'll have a magnificent, sumptuous spread on your table tonight, overflowing with turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and delicious gravy (hint: you could have stopped the gravy from overflowing by using a larger bowl with steeper sides). You know, I wouldn't have to just imagine this if you'd buy a camera already and post your pictures online.

Something that might help out with that quest is Flickr's Camera Finder. In addition to giving general information about the popularity of certain cameras on Flickr --- with graphs! --- you can also dig down to particular cameras to read reviews, get usage stats, and see uploaded photos that had been taken with that camera. If you feel like sorting by Interestingness is giving you too many awesome photos (because, you know, that's what it's supposed to do), you can instead just view the recent photos to see unbiased examples of the types of pictures you might expect upon purchasing said camera. Basically what you'd expect, at least; I don't think the Camera Finder could predict that you'd have so many pictures of turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and delicious gravy in large, steep-sided bowls if you bought one now.

Sorry for missing Tuesday, I was flying!

Hi all,

Just a quick note to say that the cool things may be a little less "a day" now that the holidays and travel plans are upon us. We'll try to post where and when we can.

Stay safe, have fun, check the traffic before you head out, and remember that they're not insane, they're family.

Oddly, some of us here have been craving a certain protein packed paste for some odd reason.

Realizing that man does not live on sandwiches alone, I was delighted to see that there's lots one can do with the brown gift of George Washington Carver. Personally, I think the chicken satay is a nice dinner treat, provided you don't spread the sauce too thin, and there's no arguing that there are lots of innovative ways to fill the niche and satisfy most folks, and even if there are some slight duplications, there's often room enough for both to succeed. (Well, there will always be some folks that will never be satisfied, but one learns to work with them instead of just letting them go.)

So, shake up that dinner with the boss and who knows, maybe you'll be the next CEO!

Yahooligans, the Yahoo! property for kids, has been getting pretty old (ironically). There isn't really any significant change between two months ago and four years ago, and even going as far back as eight years reveals a strikingly similar page. Sure, we were happy with that back in my day, back when we had to walk two miles through the snow to use our 28.8kbps modems, but kids these days are all about Web 2.0 and interactivity and tag clouds. Those whippersnappers and their AJAX...

So, in order to fit in with this younger crowd, Yahooligans has received a facelift!* Get in touch with your inner child at the new Yahoo! Kids. More updates will be rolling out over the next few months, but for now you can at least enjoy the cute site design.

* There's a social commentary if I've ever seen one.

Ok, no horrible pun for the title this time, but I did want to mention that 2.1 of the YUI libraries are out and there's some nifty new stuff.

Tossed into the collection is a new Tab View control, searchable documentation, and a mess of improvements.

One big word of caution, however. Make sure you check all the READMEs before you install the library. They did make some minor changes to things but those changes may break code. (I got bit by one of those today and it took me a while to figure out what happened. That's what I get for not reading the documentation though.) I've bugged the YUI folks to make the changes a bit more prominent on the pages.

You may have thought from our last post discussing badges that we'd pretty much exhausted all the possibilities for good content to let other people put onto their webpages. Nope! Not quite. You can also spruce up your site with this fun Yahoo! News photo badge, which allows you to pick from a bunch of categories to find the news photos that suit you best. For this site, for instance, "Odd News" and "Technology" seem to be a pretty good fit. It's too bad they don't have a category for "Cool". Or "Things".