Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Chad Dickerson (disclaimer: he signs my paycheck) has a witty, brilliant, thought provoking post (disclaimer: see previous disclaimer) that I'm glad he posted over on the main Yahoo! blog.

It kinda nails why I like to work here. Yeah, it's nice to do stuff that gets press and folks saying "Wow, you guys are smart" every now and then, but that's not really why a lot of us do this. Personally, I'm happiest when I can make someone else look better. Tools are useful, but ultimately, they're just tools. Put them in the hands of new Michaelangelos, Davincis and Edisons to make incredibly cool and useful stuff, and I'm overjoyed.

So, if you're wandering about the U.K. this weekend, stop by the UK Hack Day and rub elbows with future Donatelloes, Raphaels, and other mutant ninja artists to see what things they whip up, or just keep an eye on the hack day blog for details.

I'll admit, I was ridiculously optimistic when I saw the note about "Badges for Widgets?" on this Yodel Anecdotal post, because I've always thought it would be the awesomest thing if Yahoo! Widgets could easily be converted into fully functional web-based badges with which to clutter up my blogs/profiles/webpages. Sadly, this dream was not yet meant to be. However, the Y! Widget badge generator is still really well-designed and easy to use, and provides a very attractive way to advertise across the web all of those widgets that you've created or that you just like a lot (using a nice-looking static image that gives you the widget name, author, and rating, and links to the download page). So, you know, baby steps towards my Yahoo! Widget-filled online utopia.

Chances are (particularly if you read any of my posts here), you've messed around with the YUI libraries on a page. If you mess around with web pages for a living, those libraries are a god-send.

Intrepid soul, Stoyan Stefanov, recently figured out a way to have those same functions on any webpage you visit. Yeah, it works as part of Firefox with Firebug installed (or any browser with a full javascript console), but as he notes, it's pretty handy for rejiggering and playing with pages without doing a lot of code.

Facebook exploded onto the college scene in the middle of my junior year and I've been mildly addicted to it since then, swept up in all the crazy redesigns and clever features. The most recent, and probably one of the biggest, clever feature they put out is the Facebook Platform, which allows third party developers to distribute applications through the Facebook network and lets us users spice up our profiles a bit. Always on the cutting edge, the del.icio.us team recently released what I believe is the first Yahoo! application for the Facebook Platform, which, as you might expect from the del.icio.us team, sticks a module onto your Facebook profile containing your recently posted links (read more about it here). Hopefully there'll be many more of our applications to come!

So, with the impending shutdown of Y!Photos, folks are starting to panic. It's understandable, and while Y!Photos will be offering you options on how to store your photos going forward (Flickr. Seriously. It rules.) there's no reason that you should be limited to just that or clicking and saving hundreds of photos individually.

Be that as it may, intrepid hacker extraordinarre, Kent Brewster, managed to figure out a way to dump your full sized Y!Photos to your local machine using the existing Yahoo! APIs. For the curious ones, this uses BBAuth to access your photos and then includes the full sized files to a page you can save. It's a bit ugly in that it doesn't preserve file names or a lot of the meta-data associated with your images, but it does grab that stuff in an XML block for later fix-ups.

Personally, I'm kinda sad to see Y!Photos go. I think that it actually addressed the need of an audience that just wanted a simple tool to share photos among friends and family, but I understand that sometimes I can't have peanut butter.

Have you ever been walking around a scenic location and wondered, "Man, I wonder what all of this scenery around me looks like," but didn't actually want to physically look at it? If so, then Zurfer is the application for you! At a basic level, Zurfer uses ZoneTag to figure out where your phone is, and then can pull down photos from Flickr that were taken in the area -- things look better through a 2"x2" viewscreen anyway. Heh, I dunno, maybe it's just me that finds that amusing. In case that's getting a bit too technologically dependent for you, you can also configure Zurfer to show you Flickr photos from your contacts, groups, and favorite tags, or keep track of activity across your own photos.

But mainly I'd use it because, as indicated at the bottom of the Zurfer homepage, it makes you better looking and socially popular. Can't go wrong with that.

Over on the YUI blog, there's an interview with the creator of a YUI community site called Planet Yazaar . That's really cool! What they've created is a site where folks who work with they YUI can gather, share ideas and examples and improve things. Even better, the YUI folks are not only aware of it, but really supportive of the idea.

That's what's cool about making stuff like this. Finding out interesting ways that other folks make it even better.

When you first sign into Flickr, you're greeted with a cheery message like the one above. At least, I always assumed it was a greeting; I don't think it specified before. But as you can see now, I'm totally vindicated -- the (presumably new) grey text below the message not only assures you of its salutatory intentions but also indicates what language it's in. You're provided with a new greeting every time you reload the page, cycling through a variety of useful languages, proving that Flickr is both friendly AND educational. I'm just disappointed that the "Ahoy username!" option isn't followed up by "Now you know how to greet people in Pirate!"

Much like the entree of choice in some overcrowded, dystopian future, the web is made of people, and Yahoo! News is bringing you their stories.

To be honest, this is actually a really interesting idea, and I'll be curious how it plays out. These aren't the usual group of adorable, spunky teens who help raise awareness about the plight of Dutch llama herders, but pretty significant lightning rods from lots of different sectors (I suppose that's to be expected when the author is Kevin Sites). What's more, not only does each profile include an article and video, but comments. (Considering that Y!News' previous experience with comments was equivalent to unleashing the hounds of hell in forum format, that was a pretty surprising move.)

They're darn interesting articles, none the less, so dig in and maybe learn a few things too.

(Zoom. Enhance.)