Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Everyone seems to be using Facebook these days (I mean, including me. It's totally rad), but we all know that you're saving your best stuff for some of the awesome Yahoo! social networks, like Flickr and del.icio.us. But if you want to share those pretty photos or cool links with your Facebook friends (to enlighten them as to how much better the scene is over here, obviously), how does that work?

Ah, right. That's how. Facebook now lets you pull in updates from a variety of sources, including Flickr and del.icio.us, to display directly in your mini feed (and presumably your friends' news feeds). I don't even know if we had to do any work for this or if they're just using public APIs, but, word, thanks Facebook!

What's happening in your town? Ok, if you live somewhere like Washington DC or New York, that's probably reasonably easy to figure out, but what about Piscataway, Dubuque, and Sheboygan? Heck, you probably have no idea what's going on in Düsseldorf, Shepparton-Mooroopna and Hammerfest.

Well, now you no longer have that excuse.

From the fine folks in Yahoo! India, a previous Hack Day winner that's turning out to be a serious winner (and darn addictive at that), even if they mark Ballaghadereen as "Castlerea". Those are fighting words.

Unpronounceable fighting words, but fighting words none the less.

I'm a compulsive Photoshopper, so whenever I end up planning parties or events, I inevitably waste a couple hours trying to craft a descriptive image to associate with my invitation. Ideally some sort of groan-inducing visual pun, but I can't always get that lucky.

Now, Upcoming has long since provided the ability to upload said images to their event pages, which also highlighted a pretty sweet integration with Flickr. They've augmented this offering in two really important ways. First, as the organizer of an event, you can set one of your event images as an official flyer, placing it prominently above the inset map for all your happy event-goers to enjoy. Now everyone will be forced to appreciate my handiwork when they accept the invitation! My friends are annoyed that you're encouraging me, Upcoming.

The more subtle improvement is that Upcoming is now willing to let you upload photos directly to the event, instead of going through Flickr. Nothing against Flickr, of course, but associating Flickr photos is not as instantaneous or flexible as just tossing the photo up there. Maybe they're still using Flickr as the backend, and you certainly can still go the Flickr route if you prefer (when you click onto the photo gallery, Flickr photos are still attributed and differentiated from photos uploaded by Upcoming users). But as a user, it's awesome that I don't have to worry about having an account or exposing my Flickr friends to what a huge dork I am by means of the painful logo that I concoct. Not that they don't already have their suspicions.

There's a new look to YDN.

After extensive thought and review, the folks responsible for Yahoo! Developer Network have changed things up a bit. As a bit of inside info, this is from the influx of new blood that came into YDN recently. They brought in a bunch of design experts and user experience folks to try and address the shortcomings of the previous site.

There's a few things that need to be fixed still, but the new look is tighter and provides more organization that the previous. So, go on, check it out, and make sure you let them know what you think.

Not at all to be confused with Vietnam (it's not that bad here yet!).

Good Morning Yahoo! gives you a mishmash of interesting stories with which to start your day, all in one convenient "brew" (and that, friends, is how we delight our coffee-producing advertisers). Like a few of our other offerings (Primetime in No Time, the Yahoo! Sports Minute), this is a great way to surface a lot of the video content that we have, saving our users the trouble of going to look for it. I suppose that does mean that you'll scan through a lot of stuff that doesn't really matter as much to you, but it's easy to skip around between the videos, and I can't see that this is any more disjointed than your typical morning news fare, so maybe that's just how these things are supposed to go.

You know how it is. Sure, things are going great. You plan a big party, tell a bunch of folks, perhaps even post a notice up on upcoming.org and get folks to sign up. Then your house is hit by an asteroid, on fire, covered with radioactive gerbils. Happens all the time. Well, how do you let the merry-makers know that if they decide to show up this weekend, you're going to be serving bar-be-que instead? (Oh, and to wear lead.)

Well, turns out the fine folks at upcoming recently added a feature that lets you mail all the folks either attending or just watching, that they should probably skip the festivities and load up on Andromeda Strain vaccine to fend of the horde of glowing, other-worldy rodents that beacon the end of civilization as we know it.

Or that you could use some extra drinks.

Either really.

Usually you wouldn't want your videos to flickr, but I think we can make an exception.

Ok, so this is about a week late (which sucks because I really did want to point this out sooner), Pipes is supporting PHP output, which means that if you're on a shared service that doesn't have JSON, don't feel like dealing with XML, or just want to have a rather nice speed boost out of the deal, it's now easier than ever.

I'd also like to point out that last one if I may. It's further proof that Yahoo is the Soylent Green of the internet. We're made of people. (And we stay crunchy in blue milk, but that's a different topic.)

Are you my friend? Would you mind coming over this weekend and helping me move furniture? No? Ok, fine. Still, Kent Brewster hacked up a cool little Friend of a Friend browser, which not only uses MyBlogLog's new FOAF interfaces, and YUI controls and all sorts of nifty. He even points out some of the various problems with FOAF that MyBlogLog now makes far easier to deal with.

The problem? As it sits right now, FOAF is a giant pain to update. Most folks fire it once and forget it; the results range from amusing to disastrous.

(Well, that and you get jokers like me that add FOAF RDF tags to pages with additional meta information like "does-not-know-me-from-adam" or "may-owe-her-five-dollars", but again, that's beside the point.

Anyway, go play with it and see what sort of nifty ideas this brings, then go play with MBL's new FOAF interface.

Here in India, we speak several hundred languages amongst the billion of us. Even the Government officially recognizes 23 of them. No single person can possibly learn all Indian Languages in his lifetime and so, most of us make do with a few. Yahoo! India Maps ( http://in.maps.yahoo.com ) is no exception. After sitting through a lot of language courses, Yahoo! India Maps has now learnt to speak nine languages (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Oriya, Kannda & Malayalam) apart from English. Watch out for the "Vernacular" button along with "Map", "Satellite" and "Hybrid" buttons to see an area in it's primary language. We have covered the major cities and towns and will expand the "Language Map view" to other regions in the time to come.

For us in the team, Maps in vernacular languages is magical. Because for once, our Grand-moms and Grand-dads will get to see and understand what we do all day long sitting at Yahoo!.