Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

My friend logged into his Fantasy Basketball league page and was about to get into some hardcore roster editing when he noticed that I was staring at him. A picture of me, at least, from the upper right ad location, wearing a fake mustache and inquiring how he was doing in fragmented Spanish. If that's not relevance, I don't know what is. :P

And that's what we're going for with Me2U, a relatively new service that lets you craft customized messages with which to surprise your friends when they visit any Yahoo! site. There are relatively few templates at the moment, but I'm sure that'll expand once Me2U comes out of baaa-alpha and presumably starts charging a nominal fee to send the notes (I assume? That's how I'd model it, at least). At the moment, it's a free way to make your friends' days just that much more surreal with highly personalized and unexpected advertisements.

I didn't put together that Me2U ad for my friend, by the way. Another of our friends borrowed my Facebook picture and forwarded the same ad to me. Gotta admit, it was an unusual way to start my day.

I hope Sean doesn't mind, but I just found out that YAHOO! MAPS IS FINALLY IN AJAX!!

That's right, no more flash based interface! No more weird copy and paste bugs with Macs!

But wait, you say, it looks exactly the same as the Flash version. Yes, yes it does. And that wasn't terribly easy to do either. Still, a lot of hard work and good effort definitely paid off.

Oh yeah, and here's where I remind you that if you're not a fan of the way that Maps built things, you can always try building your own from the same tools they used (the AJAX maps code, and the YUI Libraries), or if you long for the flashy goodness, you can use that library too (which may just be getting a long awaited update in the upcoming months).

Whoo-HOO! This is a huge improvement and I'm insanely happy we're able to turn this on ahead of schedule.

As a bit of a follow-up from a previous post, looks like the Email Standards Project has given a "Solid" rating (the highest) to both the new Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Mail Classic, meaning that it meets standards for accessibility and design.

Of course, the other nice thing is that the folks in Y!Mail are working to try and get even better. Which is definitely cool.

Yahoo! Maps has added a few more tricks up its sleeves, but the most welcome one has got to be the ability to override the default directions by dragging around your route. Not happy with your commute sending you through the dead-locked Rte. 101 when 280 would work perfectly well (the Bay Area folks will know what I'm talking about)? Just grab a point on the original route, pull it over to pass through where you'd rather go, and let the magic happen. All the fun details are there, too, like letting you see the comparative lengths of the two routes and giving you the ability to unpin any points that you set and decide you don't like. I think there are a bunch of other new features in this new version of Y! Maps, but this is the one that does the best job of making getting directions less (and more) of a drag.

Dav Glass is probably best described as "cool personified". He's one of powerhouses behind YUI, the New Mail interface, and an improved WYSIWYG editor plug-in for WordPress. This one uses the YUI rich text editor that loads up fast, is nice and simple and doesn't do strange things to posts in order to be "helpful".

And that's cool.

I talked a few days ago about how much we loved Star Wars, but even I didn't know the full extent of that obsession. Check out the highly entertaining Star Wars web messenger, featuring gorgeous Star Wars decor and a whole new suite of galactic emoticons (including emoticons that interact with each other, how cool is that?). Princess Leia will fill you in on the details here.

Try out:

• (yoda)(dooku)!
• (han)(chewie)!
• (c3po)(r2d2)!
• (maul)(obiwan)!
• (vader)(trooper)!
  

Ooooh... Look at that. A panel that kinda makes that court order a little less useful I can use to help my legions of adoring fan* follow me.

Pretty spiffy, huh? Well, you can have one too.

* No, it's fan. As in singular.

(Yes, there was another post here earlier. Screw it. This is actually MUCH cooler.)

Lurking in the depths of your Flickr Pro account is a link to "Your Stats". That's right, Flickr is providing you stat information about your Flickr Photos, like how folks are finding them, where they're coming from and stuff like that. Kinda handy since, well, you don't have access to Flickr's logs to figure that stuff out yourself. They even provide a nifty chart that highlights information in a way that is oddly similar to another free web statistic package that you may be familiar with, so there's no new learnin' you need to do.

Naturally, The Flickr Blog has all the details, along with a pointer to the helpful FAQ. Stats aren't available right away since it's kind of a big data crunch and they are only providing it for folks that ask.

In the mean time, they provide some of the best "Under Construction" animated GIFs I've seen since 1999.

It can be a time-consuming process to decide on where to eat each night, so you can understand that once that's settled, I want to get over there post haste. So the main question that comes up: where is it? "129 Lytton Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94301" is the standard type of response I might receive. But while that may be accurate, it's not exactly helpful. What, you want me to get out a map (or examine the provided map in greater detail)? As if. Now, if you would just give me a landmark or some cross stree....oh. "Cross Streets: Near the intersection of Lytton Ave and High St," there in the fine print. Yup, Yahoo! Local is including cross street directions beneath the address fields on their business pages, and -- when they're correct :P -- they're really handy.

Well, as a few folks noted, Yahoo! has joined up with JetBlue to give you access to your Yahoo! mail and Yahoo! IM. Granted, although the service is wireless, that doesn't mean that there aren't a few strings attached. The fine folks at Engadget detail what it's like as well as the problems and why you probably wouldn't be downloading BitTorrents between LA and New York even if you could use something other than Y!Mail and Y!Messenger.

Here's hoping that you're next JetBlue flight is on BetaBlue.