Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

You know, when I look at Facebook, I just think of ways to add more stuff to it. You know, treat your page like an over-ripe pinata full of digital wonder to unleash on friends and wandering souls. Still, when one wants to make a great impression on fellow employers and old classmates, what better way than to toss on a relaxing video? Well, now you can give your page that musical touch that makes it yours thanks to Yahoo! Video.

Go check out the Y!Video Facebook App.

Of course, the trick has always been, how do you find the good widgets? In those good ol' days when the widget gallery was only sortable by recency, it was definitely a bit of an annoyance. But no more! The new Yahoo! Widgets site allows you to get search results sorted by relevance, top ratings, most downloads, and recency. Beyond any awesome stuff that the Widget team may have put into Y!WE 4.5, just being able to locate the best widgets in the gallery is a huge improvement.

There's no place like home. Well, unless you're going someplace new, or checking out someplace you've never been, or just want to poke around a place.

Turns out, people are pretty interested in places, and Flickr (scion of things people and interesting) has put together a new feature that focuses on people and places.

It also takes advantage of a lot of the free APIs we have to offer, including the world maps, weather, and other bits of randomy goodness.

Check out the flickr blog for details, or just go find your place in it all.

Sorry this is late; things are getting a bit busy at work.

befuddlr could probably be built off of just about any image hosting site, but they chose Flickr and, in solidarity, dropped the penultimate letter of their name, so it pretty much counts as a Yahoo!-related cool thing. All that the site does is take Flickr images, break them into a grids, shuffle the tiles, and let users try to put the images back together again -- but the idea is executed brilliantly and it's an addictive way to pass the time and explore new photos. The site also features a bookmarklet that allows you to take any Flickr image that you're viewing and "befuddle it!"

Some images, of course, come pre-befuddled.

I've always known that a great many improvements we make every day are things that you'll never see, still, what about the folks that have problems seeing any changes? Well, turns out the folks in Y!Bangalore are working on solving that problem for Y!Mail classic. (Obviously, AJAX loses a great deal of appeal when your main interface is a screen reader.)

Truth be told, making our site accessible to everyone is a pretty big effort here, and is one of the reasons that we offer "classic" versions of things like mail, maps, and other services. We're not perfect, yet, but it's something we're doing a lot to make better.

Ah Thanksgiving. A time of gathering, eating, watching parades, and attempting not to either pass out or kill Uncle Jim for insisting that the green bean casserole is made with rutabaga.

Still, once you've taken those delightful snaps you can use to further embarrass and torment family members, why not try out the new Flickr Uploader 3.0 beta? This is in it's second beta release and is markedly improved over the old uploader. Including being able to sort your photos BEFORE you upload them. The fine flickr folk are also definitely interested in your opinions and suggestions to let 'em fly.

(Fly, of course, being fairly relative until you're out of your food coma.)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go extinguish the turkey.

Flickr is now using all of those geotagged photos to populate pages for just about every place out there. I would take more time to write this entry, but I keep getting distracted by looking at pretty pictures of places that I used to live. So, just go check it out! The photo browser is really slick and you can do fun things like specifically load up pictures for popular tags by clicking the tags on the left. AND it tells you the weather.

Read more about this as well as the new World Map on the Flickr blog.

Note: we might not post very much over the Thanksgiving break (unless JR wants to. JR?), so have a wonderful holiday! Unless you don't happen to celebrate Thanksgiving, but what the heck, go on and still have an awesome Thursday.

You know, we're pretty good at making really handy stuff, and absolutely suck at telling anyone about them. Case in point, the Top Picks module shown to the right.

I discovered this handy little doo-dad while reading Matt McAlister's fine blog, and I have to admit, this is pretty darn cool. What it does is highlight posts that match whatever you're most likely to wind up reading. How does it figure that out? Well, when you read posts using My, it records the information and uses that as a metric when examining the blogs you've added. It works pretty darn well, because sure enough, I was interested in reading about a man-sized sea scorpion claw. (Note to self, after building time machine, skip the Devonian period.)

I'm curiously reluctant to download new programs onto my work computer. Not exactly sure why -- maybe I'm trying avoid distractions, maybe I don't want to clutter up my workspace, or maybe it just seems like too much of a hassle. The latest program mired in this mental red tape is the Yahoo! Music Engine, but luckily, the redesigned Yahoo! Music site (which you can read about here) has given me an excuse to temporarily table the issue, in the form of their in-page music player.

The player hovers around at the bottom of your window when you launch it, and any user (using Windows, at least, given the DRM stuff -- sorry!) can kick it off from any of the little Play icons scattered around the site to listen to 30 second samples. The real fun comes when you have a Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscription. After you jump through a few hoops to download plugins and security licenses, you can use the player to listen to full songs from the Top 100 lists or public playlists. While you can't queue up music otherwise, you are able to switch between all of the songs in a playlist when you click the "Play Playlist" button. You can also minimize the player so it doesn't interfere with the page as much (mousing over will pull up all of the controls) and it looks like the Top 100 charts are set up to let you go through the pages of songs without reloading the song that you're listening to.

There are still lots of issues -- you can't play songs in the player across the entire site, notably on the actual song/artist pages, it's reeeaaaalllly hard to get to a playlist page (I think you need to go through Y!ME to get the URL), etc. -- but it's still a really fun feature that is letting me listen to good music without needing to deal with my program-downloading issues, so I can't complain too much.

This past weekend, I got a little present from my niece. She gave me a cold. (Mind you, we're trying to teach her how to share so at this point we'll take what we can.) Still, the happy hypochondriac in me what version of the plague my cheerful, bright-eyed petri-dish inflicted my way.

Needless to say, I was surprised to see that Yahoo! Health has had a recent makeover, featuring a cleaner look, videos, more articles, as well as those oh-so-helpful articles. (Sorry to disappoint you Mr. Inner Hypochondriac, but you're probably not going to die.)

Still, as I'm emptying the tissue box and heating up the kettle, it doesn't mean I can't dream of lovely ways to pay her back. Maybe this year she gets to learn the Thanksgiving tradition of boiled brussels spouts.