Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Happy Halloween! I had no idea, but apparently we have a Yahoo! Greetings property. It's a partnership with americangreetings.com, where the tradeoff seems to be that they provide a wider selection but we have a larger free offering (for the Halloween section, anyway). So, enjoy! Because eCards are totally still where it's at.

So, by now, you may have joined the over 2,000,000 folks who've grabbed yourself a copy of Firefox2. I have, multiple times since I was a dope and forgot to save it to a portable disk, but that's beside the point.

Very spiffy and not something I believe that the other quicksearch boxes are offering yet.

Ok, I'm an idiot.

I discussed the Flickr slideshows in a previous post, but I'm not letting that hold me back! Because, after all, to view the slideshows back then, you had to navigate all the way over to some other site, maybe click a few links...can we really be expected to put forth that kind of effort? Why can't we have our slideshows show up righ...

...oh. Yeah, right there in the page. Paul Stamatiou tells you how it works in this post from nearly a year ago (you're basically just using an iframe to display a slideshow URL that takes a bunch o' parameters). Note that this is the same Paul Stamatiou who interned for Yahoo! this summer and created our corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal. Good for him (and us, for hiring him)!

People are always talking about Myweb or Del.icio.us and forgetting about the original bookmark site.

Yep, Y!bookmarks, that venerable beast that was lauched nearly half a decade before the 'Aughts and is probably more Web 0.5 than Web2.0.

Well, it's gotten updated.

Seriously updated.

Myweb folks will probably note that this looks a bit familiar, and most of the functions are the same. It is a bit easier to deal with group edits with the new interface though.

Oh yeah, and for what it's worth, Del.icio.us is for extroverts and Y!Bookmarks are for introverts.

In all of the hubbub surrounding the winning Open Hackday project, Blogging in Motion, I completely forgot to mention one of the very cool technologies that it uses: ZoneTag.

ZoneTag is a product of the Yahoo! Research labs in Berkeley, designed to simplify the process of uploading photos from your phone and associating them with relevant metadata. When you take a picture, ZoneTag grabs info about which cell tower you're connected to and uses that to take a guess at what your location might be (based on locations provided by other users for the same cell tower). It also suggests tags that make sense based on where you are --- tags that you've recently provided, friends' tags from the same area, or events/venues based on Upcoming and Yahoo! Local data. Apparently, the team has also added geotagging support to get your photos automatically mapped in Flickr as well. The caveat is that ZoneTag only works for a few Nokia phones within the US, but they're working on expanding.

Check out the ZoneTag photos page and users group for more autotagged goodness!

Well, as you probably know, Firefox 2 is out, and let's just say it's chock full of all sorts of links back to the company that owns them.

Still, there's a lot to love about the new version of Firefox, but there's one extra plugin you might want to consider. Heck, you might want to consider it if you run Firefox 1.5 still.

The fine Del.icio.us folks recently released an add-on that replaces your local bookmark manager with del.icio.us. Much like the original Y!Toolbar, you can now store your brain over on Del.icio.us and no longer worry about missing that link you accidentally saved to your work computer.

I have to admit, it takes a bit of a mind flip to get your head around this. When I say that it takes over your bookmarks, I'm not kidding. It actually rewires the bookmark manager to use del.icio.us (and keeps a local cache of them for when the network link is acting up). Presentation of the bookmarks takes a couple of different forms, you can either show recent bookmarks or group them together as tags. (For what it's worth, I have mine set up as favorite tags.)

It's not 100% flawless, of course. I've hit a snag with importing my existing bookmarks, and like I said, it's a pretty drastic mind-shift if you're used to hierarchical bookmarks or use bookmark dependant add-ons like sage, but if you have a ton of the beasties, it does make your life easier.

This is kind of fun: we're hosting an internet talent show to try to find the next big thing in online video. If that happens to be you, you could win $50,000 and a development deal to star in or produce your show. The basic idea is that, among our hundreds of millions of users, there's got to be someone with the talent to create something amazing in this space; they just need the opportunity to show it off. You may have previously seen this basic idea featured on such TV shows as The Apprentice, Project Runway, American Idol, Hell's Kitchen, America's Next Top Model, and so on. Our basic idea, however, is...um, more purple.

I feel your pain.

One of the things you hate about flash is the fact that it's an opaque box of evil dancing mortgage people. You can't view source on the page and make any heads or tails out of it. It's ickky.

Well, while that's generally true, I'll tell you what someone told me not too long ago. It doesn't have to be. While I've talked with the flash maps folks about providing a bit more detail, using the Javascript Flash API is actually pretty simple. It's also a bit more efficient about things because it can take advantage of a bunch of flash internal functions to handle things like automatically dealing with XHTTPRequests.

So, for the price of a flash module on your page, you get smaller, slightly simpler web pages. No dancing mortgage people required.

Well...more so than usual. If you're anything like me, your Sunday is devoted to sitting around on your couch and watching the games on TV. But then, if you're still like me, you also have a Fantasy Football team *cough* with Yahoo! Sports *cough* and want to keep up to date on that. Getting up to walk to your computer to check on your team? Pshaw! Surely technology has eliminated this grave inconvenience?!

Enter stage left: Yahoo! Sports on Intel Viiv! Intel Viiv is a multimedia PC that integrates with your television, and the Yahoo! Sports team has put together a great application to let you access your fantasy scores and scores from other football games directly from your couch. It's basically our GameChannel/StatTracker at your TV fingertips, via your remote control.

So, if you're one of the...er, several people who own an Intel Viiv, kick back and enjoy this whole new dimension of sports on your TV.

Hack Days have become kind of a big deal within the engineer culture at Yahoo!, and no group exemplifies that more than Yahoo! Autos. They've actually squeezed the concept into their regular work schedule, holding their own Hack Days every 5 or 6 weeks and allocating up to 15% of their time to devote to creating and refining hacks. As a result, you can see a fantastic number of fun ideas coming to life on the Yahoo! Autos site.

So, here's another!

Yahoo! Autos allows you to find used cars based on proximity to your zip code, because you don't want to be wandering all over the state to pick up a car (especially if, you know, you need a car in the first place with which to wander). As long as you're returning results where location is a concern, why not put 'em on a map? That's exactly what the Autos team did, making it easy to spot nearby cars at a glance and get some basic information about them. Nice.

I typically recommend against mashing up your car, but it looks like Yahoo! Autos has figured out how to do it right.