Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Oh sure, tomorrow brings the iPhone, and while you drive by those long lines of folks waiting to buy their slice of electronic joy, you're probably thinking "Ok, so I'm not going to have the coolest new digital toy. My phone is fine as is."

You might even be crying while you think that.

Still, buck up. A lot of folks here are also not going to be able to smudge our fingerprints across that oh-so-glossy faceplate tomorrow either.

That's why the Y!Messenger and Y!Mobile folks just rolled out some serious improvements to the Y!Mobile Messenger client, including stateful conversations (no more SMS style message delivery), more devices, lighter weight and prettier, and a more secure, standard WAP way of getting in.

Hey, it even works on my less than state of the art phone, so it probably works on yours too.

just point your phone at http://m.yahoo.com/ and enjoy.

Flickr has always been touted as one of the best places to find photos on the web, so it makes sense that we're finally...you know, helping you do the finding. That's right, Yahoo! Image Search now indexes all of those beautiful public Flickr images, nestled like gemstones among the dusty web results --- or sometimes featured a bit more prominently. In a nice touch, the attribution is featured up front with the photo owner's user name and a link to their photostream, and, yup, you can hide your photos from public searches by setting the appropriate flag at the lower right corner of the photo page (and by setting the default behavior from your Privacy & Permissions page).

Given that I often find myself searching directly in Flickr for good pictures anyway, this is definitely a welcome addition.

This one is for the ladies. Well, Canadian ladies anyway.

Not too long ago, Y!Canada rolled out http://lifestyle.yahoo.ca packed to the gills with useful info, recipes, family activities and more to help you be a better Mom.

Kinda funny that there's no section here for guys, but one can only assume that like their fellow fellows south of the border, Canadian men apparently don't have a life.

(Wait, no, I'm pretty sure most Canadian guys actually DO have a life. The ones I know certainly do. And I'm fairly sure that I know guys in the US with lives. So it's probably just me. Ooh! Star Trek is on again!)

Hot on the heels of the del.icio.us Facebook application, Upcoming has mashed up one of their own, which blends the native Facebook events with those on Upcoming and lets you display them prominently on your profile page. If you happen to use both systems to manage your busy schedule or just want to make sure that everyone who checks out your page knows how well-populated your calendar is (and subsequently, what a popular guy you must be), you should definitely check this application out.

Bill Scott is an amazing guy.

I'm lucky to sit near him and his enormous brain.

Why do I speak so highly of him? Well, for one, he's one of the folks building out the new Yahoo! Teachers project (which is still coming soon), but also because he manages to do some fairly clever things you can poke around with.

While reading his blog not too long ago, I came across an article he did that shows you how to replace paging with something far better (and yes, it uses that all-purpose tool-set of joy YUI).

Go, check it out and make it part of your regular reads too.

A little while back, I wrote about the very cool Yahoo! Shortcuts that had appeared in Classic Mail, expressing the hope that they'd be available for the Mail Beta at some point. Well...it's not yet. However, Shortcuts have been appearing in all sorts of other unexpected places -- Finance and News, for instance. Just mouse over any entities with a dashed line beneath them and a menu pops up giving you various exploratory options, such as searching for that person or viewing a map of the location. There's more detail available on the Yahoo! Search blog; for example, apparently Shortcuts exist somewhere on Yahoo! Travel as well, but I can't find 'em. One of those Maps Shortcuts might have helped for that, maybe. *grin*

Ah, right. I suppose that now would be a good time to take that Hack Day promo ad from the right side of the page. Oh, and speaking of which, here's video from the event.

(there's also full video over at the YDN Blog)

Even better than that, are the hacks, many of them are play-around-able with. (is that a word? No? Even with the excessive hyphens?)

Glad to hear that a good time was had by all, here's hoping we can do that again. (And that folks return to semi-regular sleep habits sometime this week.)

...because YUI is at least pretty awesome, practically a masterpiece, and surrounding YUI we have a huge collection of Javascript and other web development-related expertise. YUI Theater is where we share our experiences with the world at large, if you care to grab some popcorn and take a peek. Especially be sure to check out talks from such luminaries as Douglas Crockford, who's kind of a big deal.

(thanks again to Alice for the heads-up, thru the ycoolthing del.icio.us account!)

Ah.. well... Speaking of unexpected bombshells that catch you off guard, Alice pointed out a fun way that flickr's using to remove photos. When you delete files from an organized group, they're reduced to their glowing atoms in a decidedly notable way.

Kind of a fun way to change things up, and in no way responsible for weather reports in the Czech Republic.

Now, if you don't mind, I'll be joining a number of folks here in a bbq. I hear we'll be serving wtf and congratulating one of our all-time favorite engineers.

If you've ever been part of just about any online community, you'll know that, sometimes, people can be really annoying. They'll follow you around, try to get you into trouble, send you inflammatory messages, or do any number of irritating things to try to ruin your day. We call these people "trolls" and usually hope that, if we just ignore them, they'll retreat back under their bridge.

To allow you to combat this problem a bit more actively on Yahoo! Answers, the Y!A Team has introduced the Block User feature. It's actually pretty neat how it works: when you block a particular user (via their user profile or the mouseover on their avatar), they can no longer see Your Q&A page or your contact information, they can't view questions that you've asked, and they can't become your Fan. This greatly reduces their ability to follow you around, maliciously report your questions as offensive, or bother you through personal contact. In addition, the Yahoo! Answers team can use this as a tool to spot users who are incessantly getting on peoples' nerves, so that they can monitor their behavior a bit more closely to see if they need to take action. It's a tough problem to tackle, but hopefully this feature, along with existing community moderation tools, will make Answers into a bit more of a troll-free zone.