Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Another day, another place from which to Instantly Message. We've got you covered with a desktop client, obviously; in a web messenger; on your phone; alongside your mail; and now, right on your My Yahoo! page.

Really, it's pretty impressive. As far as I can tell, it works seamlessly and certainly increases the desirability of your My Yahoo! page as a place to chill out and consume content. I mean, if you're out on the road and are going to stop by your My Yahoo! page when you get online anyway, why not chat with your friends while you're there? You still run into issues with multiple points of presence (ie, it'll sign you out of any other Messenger application you have up) and you can only talk to ten people at a time before the tabs fall out of the module, but otherwise it's quite cool. In a nice touch, the page title will scroll new messages as they arrive and out of focus tabs will pulse to indicate when anyone says anything. Plenty of avatars, too.

It's only logical that they got this built eventually, though. After all, can't spell Yahoo! Messenger without My.

Long Live the LOLDolphins.

Setting up a Yahoo! Avatar has always been a bit of a chore, given that there are so many options to sort through across so many different customization categories. I don't know if Avatar Towns makes it that much easier, really, but...well, it's more interesting, at least. :)

Word of warning: when you exit a store, your outfit automatically gets saved and overwrites your previous avatar, so be sure to save your old one before you go too crazy.

Wanna make a difference in your community? Well, if you live in either San Carlos or Sacramento, CA, there's one way you can. Yahoo! Local is (very quietly) rolling out a test site for Yahoo! Neighbors. It's a suggestion board for your town so that you get a bit more of a voice in your local community. You can get updates via email for various ideas, print flyers, and recruit neighbors to try and make a difference.

They'll be officially rolling things out later, but there's no reason you can't go peek now.

Yep, you bet! My lack of calendar skills means YOU GET TWO COOL THINGS today!

What a bargain!

One of the nicer things about doing a blog like this is that you get a few "HOLY CRAP! THAT'S COOL!" moments. Yesterday (the day I was supposed to post something, stupid JR, stupid JR), I had one of those HCTC! moments when I found out about the musiclibre blog. What makes that so cool? Well, aside from the fact that it's a webjay player that pulls from various music blogs, you can put it on faceook, your blog, or nearly anywhere else. It's also pretty darn easy to customize.

Seriously, check it out, and check out the screencast too!

This is hardly an official Yahoo! product, but it was created by a Yahoo, which is close enough for me (especially when three hours late :P).

Yesterday, we talked about how the Pipes team was making URLs shorter, simpler, and more descriptive. That's all well and good, but sometimes, it just doesn't feel like you're getting your money's worth out of a diminutive URL.  Why address in 21 characters when you could instead command a spacious, say, 2048? That's where GiganticURL steps in.

Yeah. That's pretty much it. It takes your URL and makes it gigantic. Be sure to bookmark http://www.giganticurl.com/url/aHR0cDovL3ljb29sdGhpbmcuY29taHR0cDovL3ljb29sdGhpbmcuY29tYUhSMGNEb3ZMM2xqYjI5c2RHaHBibWN1WTI5dA==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 today!

Hi! My name is Sean, but you can call me I_m2V2cgpWzYei2qolbcGw--. That's my unique Yahoo! Pipes identifier from my old Pipes URL of http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/person.info?eyuid=I_m2V2cgpWzYei2qolbcGw--. I mean, there's an address that really gives you a sense of ownership over your page. :D

So, for those rare people out there who have trouble committing random 24-character strings to memory, Pipes has introduced simplified, personalized URLs for your user page and for your particular pipes. You can stake your claim to just about any URL name for yourself that hasn't been taken already (so hurry up!) to define your top level directory, giving you an entirely new namespace in which to go crazy with informative and memorable URLs for your pipes. For instance, now you can find me at http://pipes.yahoo.com/smock514 and you can try out one of my very few pipes (I'm a passive user) at http://pipes.yahoo.com/smock514/blog_search_aggregator. It's that easy!

Shortly after graduating college (I believe it was late in the Van Buren administration), one of the first things I did was send a bunch of documents off to my Computer Science profs. These were the sorts of things I thought would help out those that would follow, and for the most part they did. I managed to help a few alum even find a job or two.

Of course, this was long before the web, when mighty gophers ruled the earth. Now, it's a lot easier to help out. There are lots of social networks one can use for this, but more often than not, they're not really tied to helping out fellow classmates. They're about more casual social things that you probably don't want on your resume or have to explain in the interview with the Record Industry why you chose "Pirate" rather than "Ninja". That's where Kickstart steps up to the plate.

You can hook up with old college friends, or folks that belonged in associations, and focus on getting the kind of job you deserve. What's more, it's something we're working on and VERY interested in getting feedback on. Things aren't done (far from it) but the folks there don't want to build something without making sure it's something you'd like to use. Feel free to check back and see what changes they make.

So, give someone a kickstart in the career.

Okay, pretty sure this one is actually a new feature in Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta, unlike that last one I wrote about. Basically, when you paste in a link for a video, photo, or map (from some of the more well-known sites, at least, particularly the Yahoo! flavors), a little inline viewer will show up right in your Messenger window, saving you the trouble of having to click on the link and open up a browser.

Seems to work with YouTube, Yahoo! Video, and Flickr, as well as for single point locations for both Yahoo! and Google Maps, as far as I tested. It's also hard to test out in a single user situation, but it looks like we're suggesting to users that they watch the video together using our Zync plugin, and it would be awesome if we did the same sort of thing for the shared maps (but I'm betting that we don't...yet?).

Ok, so you've listed your various social sites, now what?

Well, for one thing, you can tell folks about it.

The MyBlogLog folks are at it again, this time creating an auto-signature link for your email so that way you just can't run and hide from your adoring fanclub.