Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

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.

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.