Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

As a few folks noted, we've been busy indexing meta information for various sites stored in microformats. Those are pretty handy because microformats allow machines to figure out extra bits of info that can be tied to a given search result.

One thing that should be noted is that meta information is pretty much extra info. I know the search folks have some REALLY interesting things up their sleeves (keep an eye here and on the YSearchBlog for details about that). Something that pretty much ensures that spammers won't get to abuse things unless you want them to.

And I think we both know the answer to that.

Cool times, indeed.

If I can't find the time to update this blog on time, clearly I don't have the time to keep up to date on all of the wonderful primetime TV on the air these days -- welcome back, writers, and please bring back The Office soon. And yet, how will I fit in with my coworkers as they revel in all the reality television goodness over lunch? Clearly the answer is to head out for a PiNT: Primetime in No Time on Yahoo! TV. Apparently we have a lot of actual show clips sitting around, and PiNT splices them all together to give you the lowdown in your downtime.

If you're going to be in or around San Francisco this upcoming Saturday, you might want to stop by for the Flickr 4th Birthday party being held at Minna Gallery. Yep, it's your chance to hang out with the purveyors of those nifty too close eyeball pictures and those spiffy forced focus shots featuring army men being attacked by giant hamsters.

Well, that aside, they're a heck of a lot of fun to hang out with anyway, and if the past three parties are anything to go from, there will be more than a few flickr-able moments.

Argh² This is turning out to be more Y!Coolthing of a day or two ago. My fault this time.
Argh³ Dang it..

Right, the first thing? Forget about it for now.

Instead, here's a new, beta version of FoxyTunes for IE.

Argh. My apologies for missing an update on Friday -- I was in LA and it just completely slipped my mind. Here's what I would have posted.

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, it's hard to estimate how large the overlap is between hardcore sports fans and readers of this blog. But even if you're on the latter side of the Venn diagram, you'll probably agree that it's nice to stay up-to-date on the big pieces of news, as long as it's pretty convenient, and what's more convenient than a minute-long video segment that runs through all the stories of the previous day? Problem solved, brought to you by the Yahoo! Sports Minute. It's a shotgun blast of important sports stuff, augmented by tons of highlights and an appealing host, which'll get you all caught up for your next conversation starter. How 'bout them [local sports team]? Now you'll know.

Well, as a few folks have noted, there's a new version of Y!Maps out, and it's pretty.

For those that are curious, it's using a bunch of the new data sets we have for locales to determine the various neighborhoods. (Yeah, they're a bit fuzzy so it's not like you should panic if you spot an Asian Market west of Powell St.), and yes the map tile images are smaller so they load much faster.

Oh yeah, about that.

If you're a programmer and have a plugin map, you REALLY REALLY want to upgrade to the new version (3.8 for AJAX, or the new Action Script 3 Flash API). The smaller tiles mean that older versions aren't going to look quite right in about a month when things switch. (Honestly, you really want to do that anyway since the API is smaller and faster too.)

I always wonder if we're ever able to convince people to buy more Yahoo! stock by having an awesome Finance site that people are browsing to figure out...well, if they should buy us. I suppose we can put this to the test while our users check out our current value on the updated interactive charts, which were updated at some unknown time to fit into the site a little bit better (instead of being an entirely separate, fully Flash experience), work a little bit smoother, and look much more streamlined (in my opinion). The interface has been trimmed down and seems to very functional, though I can't speak from the perspective of an expert users -- there are a lot of great details, though, like the fact that the stock ticker autocomplete works when you're trying to find stocks to compare or the ease with which you can add and remove technical indicators that I don't at all understand. I expect this'll add at least a dollar or so to our bid price once people find out. :D

Hmm... Something's afoot in Mash land...

People are always quick to dismiss Mash as being a failed Facebook or Myspace, when really, that's not the point of it. In truth, it's a sandbox more for us to play in, and where you're invited in too. What's more, it's somewhere we can unleash some cool things we're playing with in a fairly controlled environment.

Take, for instance what we just rolled out in Mash: BrowserPlus. Which is part of the Mash PhotoDropper available here. This little mash applet loads up and allows you to drag and drop photos from your desktop directly into flickr. You can even do some simple editing of the photos too. A bit of extra digging shows that it's running a set of Javascript in an IFrame that calls out to a windows plugin and javascript library to handle some of the additional calls and functions. (Yes, sorry, apparently it's still very much in pre-release so it's only available for Windows. I just heard from the BrowserPlus folks that it's available for

• OSX intel: (Tiger & Leopard) for safari & firefox
• Win32: (XP & Vista) IE & Firefox (spotty safari support there)

I played around a bit with it and it's fairly cool. What's more cool is imagining what all the library can do and how this could allow for a FAR more interactive web page than what just one can do with Javascript.

Hmm....

I still think that the Yahoo! Media Player is the neatest little widget ever, so it's good to see that it's still being actively worked on and improved. The newest update is a control to allow you to center your browser view around the location of the currently playing song; you can read about all of the detailed thought that went into this on their blog post (and see it in action on Ian Rogers' blog). It's really a very straightforward update, but given the context of music blogs, where a lot of thought goes into the surrounding content near an MP3 link, and the fact that my common use case is to load up a page, kick off the music player, and jump back to the tab if I hear anything interesting, this ends up being a hugely helpful feature to figure out what that interesting thing I'm listening to in the first place is all about. Okay, sure, you could probably just search for the title, but, man, I need to save my typing for writing code.