Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Us companies with punctuation integrated into our official names have got to stick together. So it makes perfect sense that Yahoo! Shopping is partnering up with Woot!, a brilliantly clever and amusing site that sells a single item per day, to produce sellout.woot!, a daily deal promoted on the top page of Yahoo! Shopping in a totally corporate and sold-out fashion. Sure, I'm positive that the buckets of money are a small consolation for the trampling of Woot!'s internet underdog tradition by an industry giant (read over their quite funny announcement here). But Woot! is able to expose its interesting deals and quirky descriptions to a much larger audience, Yahoo! Shopping gets a great module to promote on their site, and everyone wins.

"Sell out (.woot), with me tonight..."

Furthering our goal of hacking around the planet, YDN is proud to announce Yahoo! India Hack Day. This event, much like the one in London and the US will undoubtedly be a heckuva lot of fun and honestly, if you're in Bangalore around then, you'll be sorry you missed it.

When I was developing my NCAA Basketball widget barely in time for March Madness last year, one of the more annoying issues was that, once a live version of my widget got out there, users that downloaded it would be stuck with whatever buggy or unpolished behavior came along with that version unless they were religiously checking and installing my updates from the Widget Gallery. Sure, I suppose the take-home lesson is to just write better widget code, but, heh, it can be trickier than it sounds, folks.

So one very fun feature that the Widgets team added (and that I entirely missed out on up until now) is the ability to automatically notify users of new updates just through resubmission to the gallery. All you need to do is register for a unique widget identifier and set version numbers correctly, and it seems like it'll just work, notifying users of your widget that a new version is available and prompting them to install it. I'll admit that I haven't personally tried this out just yet, because March and NCAA basketball are still a few more months away. But, if it works as advertised, you'll know once I do.

Want to know what the market is thinking? Well, yeah, I mean, we all do since that's usually a prime way to find out when to buy or sell, still it'd be nice to have an indication of where things are going without consulting the talking heads on the finance channels. (Or maybe those stock tips I get about that nifty new "upcoming" stock for a company that mails you bags of kitty litter.)

The new Y!Finance beta New Finance Beta features the Community Sentiment module near the bottom of the page. It monitors the stock groups to see where there's the most traffic and what folks are saying in order to figure out which stocks are hot, and which... aren't.

"Dear Mac users,

We haven't forgotten about you. Have a new Beta.

Love,
The Messenger team"

Let's see, cars, sports, news, weather, personal, local information, maps, astrology, pets, beer recipes, bait and tackle, what else do we do?

Oh yeah! Search! We do that too!

So, you probably know about search.yahoo.com, the lighter, faster search specific page for those of you living that zen lifestyle, but there are a few others you probably don't know about.

The first is the Search Tools page that lists out the various and nifty ways one can search for stuff on Yahoo! The other is the somewhat smaller and easier to remember ysearch.com site. Granted, that's not as small as web.im, but it's pretty easy on the keyboard.

After tantalizing you with minuscule images of my sumptuous My Yahoo! page a couple weeks ago, I feel guilty about continuing to keep you from its full glory. Go, my friend. Bask in its orange-toned goodness.

That link is provided courtesy of the "Share this page" feature of My Yahoo!, which provides a link to, when clicked, bring up my page within My Yahoo! and give you the option to save it as one of your own. Give one to your dad because he's too computer illiterate to come up with his own! Make one for that cute girl down the street, because, man, My Yahoo! pages are the new mix tape. And for a final particularly clever application of this feature, be sure to always copy your own email address whenever you email out the page link, so that you can keep an archive of saved pages to reload when desired.

Heck, why even settle for "free"? You can make a profit off the deal.

Bet that got your attention.

So, what do you have to do? Turns out, it's pretty easy. All you have to do is create a cool little application that uses the Yahoo Mail interface, and get folks to sign up for Premium mail. After two folks sign up, you've got enough to pay for your subscription (thus those quotes around the "free"). Get three folks and you're makin' money.

Yeah, ok, so you got to pony up $20 a year for the Plus stuff, but there's no reason it has to be your $20.