Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Whoa, clearly we missed a day because we were just so dazzled by the new Wordpress look. It's new and shiny, like the recently launched Shine (from Yahoo!), which is not for me. Rather, it's a community site intended for women, who have apparently been vastly under-represented in our previous offerings (as an employee of Yahoo! Sports and our all-male engineering squad, I take offense at that statement). In addition to providing a ton of great lady-oriented content, it also lets users create their own blogs to share their own opinions and connect with other opinionated women (...er, of which I know none).

One other pretty neat thing is the tour that pops up the first time you visit the site. I think we used something similar with Yahoo! Buzz; I'm not positive, but I'd like to think it's all done with metadata and fun Javascript. The general idea is that it whizzes you around the page to hit up all of the labeled key features, giving you a really quick and effective way to convey how to use a site.

When you have a very specific function that you need brought right to your desktop, Yahoo! Widgets are there for you. With nearly five thousand to choose from, there's a pretty good chance that someone's had the same need as you have, except they're not as lazy and actually devoted the time to putting together a solution. Once you start using Yahoo! widgets, though, you'll occasionally have a hankering for a widget that's good, not merely functional. Being able to search by rating helps, and you can also check out the archive of Spotlit widgets. These are widgets that the gallery moderators have singled out as being a cut above the rest -- regardless of what you're looking for, you might want to check these out. The Spotlight feature itself has been around for a while, but I just now noticed the archive, which is great for us people who haven't been keeping up with downloading new widgets and missed a few updates.

No, I'm not promoting this simply because my basketball widget is in there.

MyBlogLog. Oh yeah, that's the service that tells you who's seen your site, right? It's cute.

Uhm. well, yes and no.

I mean it's still does that (and does outbound link tracking and shows you things of interest for folks that visit your site which you can't get from your logs), but that's just a tiny fraction of the stuff you can do with it. To be honest, MyBlogLog is a heck of a lot more.

We've talked about some of the things here, but honestly, I don't think folks really get all the stuff they've put out. For one, you can store connections to various social networks there (41 on last count), and much like friendfeed, you can get updates on various contact's doings and happenings. What's more, unlike friendfeed which just rolled out their API, MyBlogLog's API has been out for months, and is nearly constantly getting new features rolled out to it. (Heck, does FriendFeed use your phone or laptop's bluetooth configuration to let you spot folks around you like m.mybloglog.com?

Thing is, they like doing this on the quiet and surprising folks. It's just a shame that more folks haven't noticed what these guys have been up to.

I had really wanted to write about the Yahoo! Messenger message format Easter Egg, because I know I had surprised by the change when I upgraded to Messenger 9.0 and it was cool that the Messenger team appreciated that concern enough to provide functional, if convoluted, alternatives without even requiring me to download a new client. Of course, I had gotten used to the new look by now and subsequently didn't switch, but I still thought it was a nice gesture.

Of course, then the Messenger folks had to go and ruin my plans by announcing that Yahoo! Messenger for Mac now offers voice chat, which Mac users have been clamoring for ever since...well, forever, I guess. According to my agent in the field, the quality is good and his cell phone battery appreciates the reprieve from the draining work of making international phone calls -- if that's not a glowing endorsement, I don't know what is.

So, given that the addition of voice chat on the Mac is a much bigger announcement than a fun little format hack, I guess we won't mention the latter today, but you should definitely see if you can find a link to it somewhere (I'm sure someone is blogging about it!) and check it out, too.

If you've ever used pipes, you know how cool they are. The only problem is what to do with the output of the pipe.

Well, looks like the Pipes folks have released the first solution: Pipes Badges

These are spiffy little tools (which I still think should have been called faucets), that allow you to embed a bit of case hardened Javascript on a page and get a nifty javascript tool out of it.

Adding a pipe badge is amazingly simple, in fact, here's one now:

and here's the code:
<script src="http://pipes.yahoo.com/js/mapbadge.js">
{
"pipe_id": "1mrlkB232xGjJDdwXqIxGw",
"pipe_params": {"location":"palo alto, ca","what":"parks","mindist":"10"},
"count" : 5
}
</script>

which means that popping a map on a page has become laughably trivial.

We can put election stickers on our cars, our shirts, our laptops, and our pets, so why not on our websites? Yahoo! News has put together a nice Election '08 badge with which you can show your support for any of four candidates, including the irrepressible Dr. Ron Paul (didn't he already drop out?).

See latest stories on Yahoo! News

I'm not sure if this is at all tied to the "Be A Superdelegate" Facebook/MySpace application, but it at least looks very similar! The "Be A Superdelegate" application (more information here) allows you to virtually participate in the all-important Democratic nomination process, as well as get the pretty badge featured above onto your Facebook/MySpace page. The democratic principles of this nation thank you.

In their continuing effort to prove that sleep is for the weak and sickly, MyBlogLog has rolled out yet another cool feature, again based on using what folks are giving them to do cool things. This time, it's Topics, which takes elements of content contributed by members that are tagged with various keywords and allowing you to breeze through them. They also generate a list of "related" links should you find those more interesting than what you're looking at.

As you can tell, I'm a day late with my post. It would have been about the start of March Madness, except I ended up spending all of my time making sure that we had everything done on our side to handle this time of year. But it's not too late to check out a few of the things we're working on!

First off, yup, it's the first day of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, and there's a rolling slate of first round games chugging along throughout the entire day. One particularly nice thing that we've done on Yahoo! Sports is to start intermixing live game scores with our editorial presentation. It's a huge advantage of websites over magazines/newspapers that they can be dynamic, so why not go all out? There's a whole Live Look column on the site top page, but you can also just see little score blurbs on just about any day intermixed in the sub-stories marked by LIVE tags, first developed by one of my coworkers for one of our hack days.

I wrote a widget a while back that's also pretty convenient for keeping track of games, but the main thing I wanted to bring up with that is that Yahoo! Widgets has excellent support for colorizing (tinting, essentially) images, making it really easy to offer color customization on your widget without very much work at all.

And finally, like I mentioned, it's not too late to get in on the fun! Even though most bracket games have locked down by now, we're offering a Second Chance game for the first time this year, which gives you a clean slate starting with the Sweet Sixteen. If you missed the deadline or just aren't happy because you picked Kent St. to win the Midwest Region, this one's for you.

Ok, so chances are pretty good you wanted to go to the Hadoop summit, but can't. I say that because I know that it's been sold out since minutes after it was announced. And then the extra tickets sold out. Well, there's some good news for folks that may have missed the announcement.

YDN will be broadcasting (and archiving) the video from the summit so that you can attend straight from your living room. Heck, invite a few friends over and order in some sandwiches and it'll be just like being there.

About 800K to 1M users, it looks like. Both TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb have reported on initial numbers from our PR folk discussing the amount of traffic shifted to external sites after the introduction of the "Buzzing Now" stories on the top page of Yahoo! (see the TechCrunch article for a sample of what it looks like), culled from the top stories that percolate up on Yahoo! Buzz. The numbers are stunning, as any internal Yahoo probably could have told you -- we're quite familiar with the "firehose" effect of a F1 featured link -- and hopefully it goes to demonstrate that this experiment is having the desired effect of putting great content, from all over the web, in front of interested users who are willing to spend the time on a click. It's still to early to tell whether the Yahoo! Buzz site itself is the correct model for aggregating the social content, but things are certainly looking up for a more open and engaging front door.