Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Back when the internet was young and packets were delivered by hand, in the snow, uphill, both ways, Yahoo! had a service where it'd take you to a completely random link taken from the directory of links we had. In the era before sites like digg, reddit, and stumble-upon, folks would go there to find... well, anything.

If you're curious, the random link is: http://random.yahoo.com/bin/ryl. Here's hoping you enjoy getting a little lost on the internet.

The Chicago Tribune recently published a favorable review of Yahoo! Search, specifically highlighting a bunch of the great enhanced shortcut modules we've added for things like music and movies. So, that's pretty cool, but the main thing is that the first shortcut featured in the article was the Sports players shortcut, initially launched for baseball players and now available for football players, too. This feature makes it ridiculously easy to find relevant information about your favorite players (game stats, fantasy rankings, handy links to more detailed content), and it was worked on by my cubicle neighbor, so good for him!

Ah, August. A time when local kids get to go back to school and the rest of us realize the one truth left about the waining days of summer.

That being: "Holy #&@$, Summer's almost over!"

So, if you're suddenly realizing that yes, it has been a whole year since you packed up that gear from last summer and want to take a few more hikes through the wilderness, http://parks.yahoo.com is here to help. It's a handy shortcut to Travel's guides to US Parks featuring descriptions, maps, directions on how to get there and other useful things to help you keep summer going for just one more day.

(Note: Yeah, I'm filing a bug about the map insert right now. Looks like there's a couple of MIME encoded characters at the end of that string.)

Looking back on my youth, I can fondly remember the endless...minutes of fun that I had with SmarterChild, an AIM bot that would cleverly respond your messages to produce a reasonable facsimile of normal conversation, provided that your normal conversations centered around trying to get your robotic counterpart to say something vaguely inappropriate. Turing Tests had never been more amusing.

ylocalbot is not that kind of chat bot. He isn't quite as interested in how your day is going or why you feel the way you do about <blank>, but he can quickly return back Y! Local search results and directions if you're looking to cut down on how often you open up your browser. Ask him about "vietnamese in Palo Alto, CA", follow up on any of the numbered results (by replying with the number) to get directions (from the center of your search location, it looks like, which is a kind of interesting decision), and type "more" to scroll through the other options.

Or have fun with the fact that you can get him to say anything in the form "I'm sorry, but I'm unable to locate any X in Y" if your request, "X in Y", doesn't return any results. Looks like I haven't quite outgrown my SmarterChild phase...

Thanks to Michael for the heads up!

I want you to know that this wasn't the post I really wanted to do. Oh sure, the new dynamic mail is launched without the "beta" (and they're keeping the "classic" version around too), which is cool, except that it seems like every blog is talking about it like some giant bespectacled mutant trodding through your backyard.

Unfortunately, while I would rather tell you about something not quite as well covered (like the fact that you can now not only plan trips, but voyages and holidays as well), I've been informed that if I don't point out something cool that's been kinda overlooked about the new mail, I won't be allowed to sit with the popular kids at lunch.

So, here's something that a lot of folks haven't noticed yet. If you select a message, and then click on "Subject" (to sort by subject), the selected message stays visible at the top of the sorted list. That's kinda handy if you want to follow a discussion and don't want to just search for messages with that subject.

There. Done. Feel free to bask in the joy that is the new version of Y!Mail, and feel free to switch back and forth to the classic anytime you like.

I had mentioned in an earlier blog post how much I liked the new inline player for the Yahoo! home page. Clearly I'm much more influential than I thought. *grin* The neglected "Life" tab on the far right of the Featured module has been replaced with a fancy new "Video" tab, which hosts all of the interesting video stories that have popped up recently. You can watch directly from the page using that inline player that I gushed over, or jump off to related news articles. It's definitely more engaging to me than the "Life" content, plus it's a great way to raise awareness about our Video product and the fun content stored therein.

Also, the player finally indicates loading progress! Gosh, that annoyed me so much.

If you've been using anything on Yahoo! for more than a few months, chances are you've not seen this. You probably remember the old registration page, well, that or you've managed to put it behind you thanks to group therapy and selective memory. It was long, a bit confusing and in great need of an update.

Well, guess what the registration folks finally updated?

It's shorter and full of honestly helpful little additions to make registering simpler and easier. Congrat's Registration folks!

While Yahoo! Mail Beta is pretty darn sweet, sometimes you just develop a taste for the Classics. However, switching back and forth takes a few clicks and can be more hassle than you want to deal with, especially if you only want to use Yahoo! Mail Classic for a single session or would like to always use a different mail setup between work and home.

The Y! Mail FAQ -- "a collection of the most frequently asked questions from the official Y-Mail User Group, plus many great tips and tools made available by its members" -- has an answer. If you take your regular mail URL, usually of the form:

http://*.*.mail.yahoo.com/*

and replace it with:

http://*.*.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?ymv=0

you'll be logged into Mail Classic for that session. You can then bookmark that URL for easy access, or if you're like me and use a couple of different accounts that might be in different mail farms, try hitting this bookmarklet that I just wrote -- Classic Mail Switcher* (drag it up to your Bookmarks bar, maybe) -- from any Mail Beta page.

* Note that this'll only work if you're normally on Mail Beta and want to switch back and forth from there. I'm not sure what sort of URL hack you'd use to temporarily flip from Classic to Beta.**

** Yes, it just sends you back to http://mail.yahoo.com if you're at a URL containing both "mail.yahoo.com/" and "ymv=0". Yes, I'm lazy.

After listening to the radio on my way in from work, I almost always end up with a new favorite song stuck in my head that I desperately need to download and cherish. Inevitably, I'll forget almost all of the relevant details by the time I get to my computer, leaving me with a vague tune, some lyrics, maybe even the artist if I'm really lucky. Yahoo! Audio Search has much made it much easier to unravel these musical mysteries by including inline 30-second samples alongside their audio search results, letting me quickly run through anything that comes up to see if it matches that fragment of a melody rattling around in my brain. For instance, I could easily sort through Linkin Park's newest songs to locate that one from the Transformers movie that they've been playing on every station for the last month ("What I've Done", for reference). The search capabilities aren't quite as flexible as I'd like -- for instance, it would be great to have an integrated lyrics search instead of needing to jump back and forth between this and our Music site -- but the fact that we've implemented at least the inline samples part is definitely music to my ears.

Just got word that the Flash folks here have released a BSD licensed library of developer tools called Astra that looks to be darn useful. It's the first step of a pretty rich environment they're working on. A few quick notes before you run off and get it:

• Astra requires Flash CS3, meaning you either already have it, grab the 30 day trial, or plunk down $700.
• The current version just has charts. That's not all they're going to offer. It's all about the baby steps for now.

There's more info over at the newly hatched YSWFBlog (which I'm fairly sure is not named after some Welsh river. Aye, there be the mighty Yswf which winds it's way past Yggkrwyyggn on the Wgllrrgh ).