Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

For all of our friends using http://web.im, try typing out [..] for an exclusive web-messenger-only emoticon! Sure, your friends using the desktop client will just see a box with eyes, but you'll know how cool you are.

There are a few iPhones on campus.

Ok, that's not quite right. It's more like half the folks at Yahoo! have one and the other half are continually looking over those folks shoulders asking questions about them. Why not? They're the cool new toy that folks gotta have.

Not too surprisingly, the folks at Y!Mobile looked at one-search and said to themselves, "You know, cool and handy as this is, it just doesn't look "right" on the iPhone."

Go grab your delightful tribute to Cupertino and visit "http://m.yahoo.com" and you'll see a more iPhone like version of One Search (seen here, thanks to Melanie) in all it's finger flickin' goodness.

In case you haven't been following baseball recently, Barry Bonds just hit his 754th home run today, pulling him within one of Hank Aaron's long-standing career home run record. One particularly excellent way to keep track of this historic* pursuit is the Bonds Home Run Watch module that we have on the MLB page of Yahoo! Sports. It keeps track of exactly how each of Barry's last home runs (from 750 on up) went down, displays live game information while the Giants are on the field (or upcoming game information when they're not), and, I dunno, it's just kind of nice to steroid stare at.

* You know, just practicing putting asterisks on things.

Ok, chances are you're probably aware of this. Heck, it's been on the front of slashdot, technorati, and a mess of other blogs, but just in case you've emerged from your isolation tank....

Steve Souders (who I've mentioned here before) rolled out a pretty handy little plugin called "YSlow" to help you optimize how your page are displayed and make them nice and responsive for visitors.

Granted, a fair number of things it dings you on can be out of your control (e.g. this site gets a rather depressing grade "F (46)", mostly for things that aren't really in my control, like the del.icio.us plugins and some of the other add-ins), but if you subtract that, grade on a curve, and possibly slip a few Benjamins in with the final exam, I actually get a pretty passing grade.

I was talking to one of my coworkers a few days ago and a random topic came up. Quite literally, actually -- we were looking at del.icio.us and he mentioned that he clicked on a link that randomly took him to cnn.com. Turns out that del.icio.us has a feature that allows you to jump to some random page that someone else has tagged, from the recent posts page. You can also set up a bookmarklet to do the same thing. It's like a naive version of StumbleUpon, so it's nothing particularly revolutionary; still, it's a fun feature that I hadn't realized we had.

Looks like the good folks over at Yahoo Pipes have been busy, including adding eight more pipe fittings, including a much needed loop, subelement, and translate.

I gotta say, omg!, the fairly new celebrity-centric entertaiment property, really appeals to our lowest common denominator. They present an interesting grid layout of news stories, photos, and videos, but on the most inane topics, like how Kate Hudson is wearing a yellow dress or how popular big sunglasses are these days. Still, I can't help but visit every now and then. I am shamed. :(

It is kind of cute how they put a check mark over stories that you've read, at least. Right, I'm simply appreciating it for that technical marvel, not for the pictures of Penelope Cruz in a bathing suit.

Got a Windows Mobile phone? Got del.icio.us?

Now you can get'em together. Intrepid soul Dale Lane over at Learn Something New took the challenge to build a plugin DLL for the mobile ie browser that lets you seamlessly call del.icio.us to mark various visited sites.

Thanks Dale!

I think I can safely let this blog post and this video (and the fantastic acting therein) speak for themselves.

If you've got a Windows Media Center Edition PC and love sports, then you should definitely try it out.

(Dang it. Sorry about the outage tonight.)

Looks like music.yahoo.com got a facelift with some rather nice new additions, including upcoming(.yahoo.com) concerts, customization and other welcome teaks.

including the option to go back to the old look.

you know, if your old skool.