Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

I love threading in email -- it's one of the primary reasons that I use Gmail for my main personal account (as well as lock-in from before I started working at Yahoo!, as well as...er, competitive analysis?). So it's always encouraging to see new, tentative baby steps towards more robust support for threading in the New Yahoo! Mail, even if we're not quite there yet. The most recent addition is the ability to navigate through a "thread" of messages (more explicitly, messages with very similar titles) using handy arrow buttons located in the upper left of your preview pane.

If you're paying close attention, you'll notice that this is an extension of the Extended Navigation system, just made significantly less arcane. You can achieve the same results as clicking on the left/right arrows by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Down/Up.

SHH!!

Looks like registration is rolling out OpenID a few days early.

What's more, there are a few additional options one can take whilst setting up said OpenID, including using a customized OpenID identifier based off of either your flickr account, one of your aliases, your normal Yahoo! ID (probably don't want to use this if you don't want to get spam), or a string of random, case sensitive crap that you're unlikely to ever remember. Granted, absolutely no chance of spam there.

Personally, i picked my standard Yahoo! ID since I've had it for 10 years and I've been regularly training my Yahoo! Spam filter. (You do realize that marking messages as Spam is a damn good idea, right?)

Still, SHH! This is a secret pre-release, so don't tell! ;)

Hey, weren't we just talking about OpenID? How's that for fast turn around?

Ok, so, big news TOMORROW.

For now, Del.icio.us on your iPhone.

Check here tomorrow.

I often use this space to write about neat Yahoo! things that I had never really noticed until randomly stumbling upon them in my day-to-day life. Sadly, I'm not particularly observant, so my apologies if this was blatantly obvious to everyone else. I upgraded to Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 nearly three months ago and only recently bothered to mouse over the little marble-looking thing next to the window controls in the title bar. Always figured it had something to do with my online status.

By the disgusted look on your face, I'll assume you already knew that, nope, it's obviously the control by which you change your Messenger skin. I personally prefer Icy Blue, but then again, I can't even interpret simple user interfaces, so maybe my opinion shouldn't count for too much here.

If you're like me, you use a lot of Yahoo stuff. You live, breath, and draw a paycheck from Yahoo!, so you're admittedly a tad biased about things. Needless to say, having family members that use services like AOL you tend to try and evangelize things. (Well, ok, you tend to cry a lot, but that's beside the point.)

Well, turns out that the fine folks in AOL have rolled out a rather useful module for AOL's home page. You can now check your Y!Mail on AOL.

Of course, if you use the Y!Mail API, you can pretty much check your Yahoo! mail from darn near anything, but ultimately it's about providing choices.

I remember a few Yahoos complaining mightily about the inability to do plain-text quoting (with the >'s) in the new Yahoo! Mail when it first launched. The good news is, I just noticed that there's an option to turn on plain-text quoting when you reply to plain-text emails! Check out the Mail Options page, where you'll see a "Mark original message with > (plain text only)" checkbox. The amusing news is, at least in my test case, each word was split out onto its own line, giving me a reply that looked
> something
> like
> this.

But presumably that'll get fixed eventually, so if you're one of those old school bracket repliers, keep an eye on this option.

Or, I dunno, maybe it only broke for me. I filed a bug anyway. Try it out!

You know I'm starting to think that the music guys are unstoppable.

First, a few weeks ago they released the javascript player (which you may note is attached to this post and plays a recording of the now departed San Francisco Dial-a-Time service). Which is both spiffy and insanely simple to use, and then they went and released something even cooler. (Although highly experimental.)

I've been messing around with it for a while and even if there's the threat of it turning me into a wall crawling superhero, it's still darn cool.

It does require a bit of extra info to actually get rolling. For one, the Air AutoInstaller doesn't always work right, (again, experimental) so it's a good idea to install that first, and then install the application.

Once installed, it's fairly straight forward to use. Simply pick out one of the 100 blogs listed (or add your own), and it automatically loads up the page, finds the tracks on it and starts playing them with nifty crossfades and happy article texts. Plus, you can add the really cool tracks to your own remix list.

What they've done is made it really, really easy to get into music blogs.

And that's damn, cool.

Right, so as i mentioned last week, MyBlogLog is offering a closed beta of their API.

Why should you care? Well, remember, MyBlogLog offers a lot of functions in addition to just "Who's reading my blog?" In fact, ReadWriteWeb has a very good write-up about what all is being offered:

MyBlogLog is an incredible model of how to leverage human psychology in order to access peoples' data. The prospect of seeing the faces of people who visit your blog is so seductive that thousands if not millions of people have offered their faces and information to MyBlogLog in order to participate. Compare this to the staid pitch of OpenID, where the "utility" of single sign-on has been the most clearly articulated value proposition so far.

Add in the fact that MyBlogLog lets folks specify other network affiliations and allows folks to control how their data is used and you start to really see how this can be powerful. Kent even provides a very good example of what you can do with it, by grabbing publicly declared interfaces (in this case twitter).

So, how does one go about getting into this closed beta? Well, the easiest way is to ask. Just go to http://developer.yahoo.com/mybloglog/ and ask.

Simple, huh?

JR already suggested a few more cool things to talk about in his last post, but I haven't had a chance to sign up for the MyBlogLog API Beta, nor have I downloaded the Blog Remixer (even though it looks really cool). So I'll let JR handle those next week. :)

Instead, for you, I have another cute Address Book feature! You look so excited. But if you've accidentally entered a bunch of your contacts multiple times or have imported your contacts from multiple sources and ended up with duplicates, you'll be glad that I'm mentioning the Clean Up Duplicates tool, which hunts for common entries in your address book and does a nice job of presenting a clean interface with which to merge them all together. Thanks to Ryan K. for the heads up from the Y! Mail blog.

Well, when it rains it pours around here. (In my case, about an hour and a half after publish time)

We'll get to the MyBlogLog API Closed Beta announcement soon and a bit more on the Blog Remixer tool the music guys just released, but today's big news is that Yahoo! is becoming an OpenID publisher, and it's easy to get started adding it to your apps.

Wait, wasn't Flickr doing that?

Yep, and so is the rest of the company.

Mind you, we're still just publishing credentials and not yet consuming them, but it does mean that anyone with a Yahoo! account now has an OpenID account, and does start the path toward some very interesting times ahead.