Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Yahoo! Sports has been collecting a ton of awesome video recently; for instance, hopefully you've noticed all of the NBA game highlight links on the scoreboards, the preponderance of expert fantasy advice, even random stuff like UFC post-fight interviews. Of course, most of these videos are scattered in convenient locations around the site, but what if you're just some crazy sports nut who wants to browse through anything and everything about your favorite league? Check out our video hubs. From one central location, you can easily get all of the best NHL plays of the week, or all the Sunday morning Fantasy Football advice you can handle, or all your Davis Cup action (go USA!), and waste away your late evening at the office in one fell swoop.

For what it's worth, I don't have an iPhone. Instead, I have a Helio. It's actually pretty nice with great integration to Y!Mail, Y!Messenger and other Y!Stuff, but recently they added one feature that is very cool indeed.

You can take a photo, save it to your phone (not external memory for some reason), and then upload it directly to flickr with geo-coding, which makes it really easy. Oh yeah, and it's a completely free service.

Star Wars fans can be a passionate bunch. They know the ins and outs of each sparsely colonized star system, each furry alien race, each Sith Lord and the Sith Lords that came before them, et cetera. They lament for those better days when Han shot first. The potential application of this vast array of kinda useless information and the devoted community that lives and breathes it is what makes our World of Star Wars and particularly the character/item/place pages pretty interesting.

Take the Death Star, for instance. You start off with a stub page, with a nice picture and a basic description. Then, people can just go crazy with it. Add photos and videos, notably stuff that you wouldn't necessarily expect or find on your own. Affiliate themselves with it so that you can browse through other fans of this thing and see what else they like. Add tags to put into their own words what they associate with this space station. Top it off with some external search data, questions and answers, message board posts, and you're starting to generate a nice collection of data without actually needing to do any work.

This isn't exactly being fleshed out as such on the site, but there's a lot of potential there. It basically feels like we're pre-seeding a wiki on a niche topic and seeing what the Internet can come up with, and that's always something to look forward to. I would love it even more if we actually opened it up -- allow users to really edit and customize descriptions of characters, items, and places, basically turn the pages into Mash profiles, maybe tie in the site reputation system to control which edits are worthwhile, who should be permitted to make changes, and so on. In a nutshell, make it as easy as possible to capture the energy and knowledge of this fan base. It's really an exciting world of possibilities, and I hope it fares better than Alderaan. :)

A few other sites are talking about this, but if you run Vista, you can now officially run the Vista Preview Messenger.

More details (including a screen cast tour of the new features for those of you who aren't running Vista) on the Y!Messenger blog.

Flickr has partnered with Picnik to provide cool in-line photo editing, and having tried it out a bit, I have to agree, it's pretty darn cool.

There are two levels, free (which does a lot of general fixes you probably dread loading up a photo editor to do), and Premium, which costs $25 a year and lets you add a lot more to your photos, and literally whiten teeth and give your photos fresher breath.

Unfortunately, you can't gift it (like you can Flickr accounts), but it's still a great way to make those holiday photos better.

I really don't know anything about music blogs. But apparently they're some sort of big thing now, and our Easylistener makes it really easy to pull 'em into a nice player. For instance, it took me about a minute to find stereogum.com (one of the very early music blogs), throw it into the Easylistener generator, and produce this cool widget to distract you from this blog post.

Go on! Read more about it here, because these guys actually know what they're talking about.

EDIT: Wow, we really are repeating ourselves a lot around here, sorry! JR covered this very topic with his last post about music blogs, which I did remember but which I entirely forgot included the webjay player that this is...well, basically the same as. Just FYI, though, one of the really cool things about this interface for creating a player is how straightforward it is to customize, as demonstrated by the entirely different and awesome looking player above. Of course, JR also mentioned that in his post but, you know, I'm stretching for content here. :P

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.