Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

It's always cool when I mention a feature in passing and it garners a mention on an official blog a few days later. Of course, the integration of Alpha _beta on top of the Australian news site has absolutely nothing to do with my post, but it's still nice to feel prescient once in a while. Mostly, Alpha _beta is augmenting the Australian news search results with photos (both from Image Search and from Flickr) and actual web results, so it's nothing hugely different from the regular application, but it certainly does make the results look prettier and feel a bit more comprehensive.

This will seen exceptionally shallow of me, but while it's awesome that we've launched a permanant home for our LGBT Pride site, while it provides a really interesting timeline and a cool map of Pride events around the world, and while it's fantastic (fabulous?) that we're putting the engineering effort behind supporting the exceptionally important gay pride movement (marriage for all! Yay California)...

Yeah, the part I'm impressed by most is the banner. It's just mesmerizing.

And in continuing redesign news, My Yahoo! has also gotten a bit of a facelift, streamlining their navigation and emphasizing the concept of different pages by accentuating them with tabs. One of the things that struck me first is that there was a weird gap to the left of the first tab, and I couldn't figure out why. Turns out that we now have a bit more control over our Quicklinks section, too, and can remove it a bit more effectively from the page by relegating it to that corner. I wouldn't mind it so much if I could completely customize it, but getting it out of the way will work for now.

Every now and then, a few interesting things come out of Australia, like the Alpha _beta search engine and the first rollout of a new Yahoo! mail domain for Yahoo!7 users. And, you know, they export some cute pictures of koalas, too. They're at it again with their redesign of the Yahoo! Australia homepage, which definitely is flashier than the standard version (literally, the main module is done in Flash. You can disable it, don't worry) and features a few cool upgrades, like increased (or, at least, more visible) localization around weather, movies, food, and TV, and a few fun integrations with personalized services like Flickr, Answers, and Y! Video (when you mouse-over those logos). I personally prefer the standard version from an aesthetic standpoint, but the increased focus on Stuff About You is a welcome exploration.

I've got to admit, I'm not a heavy MyBlogLog user, but they certainly do put together some pretty neat stuff. Their most recent adventure is Connector, which maps out all of the other sites that your MyBlogLog contacts are using, so that you can join up with them over there, too. After all, if you're really friends with someone, you might want to see their photos (on Flickr) or read the same cool sites as them (via del.icio.us and Digg) or be privy to every single action they take throughout the day (thanks, Twitter). Presumably your contacts would have had to first add their affiliation with these services through the MyBlogLog Services profile stuff -- I don't think we're in the business of correlating against scraped user databases just yet.

In closing, MyBlogLog Blog is an amazing name. It evokes fond memories of Bob Loblaw's Law Blog and I miss Arrested Development all over again.

Whenever I'm scanning through movie reviews, I usually find that it helps to read through the outliers. If one critic tears a movie a new one, what was his main beef? Were there any positives grudgingly admitted? And how does that compare to this other review that waxes poetic about the movie's instant classic status? Are any of the perceived flaws from the first review explained away? It's a nice way to end up with a fairly unbiased picture of what you might actually get out of your hard-earned $10.

The Summer Movie Guide presents the same idea on its review pages (for example, Get Smart) by calling out some of the best reviews both from people who hated and people who loved a movie. It takes it one step beyond just plucking out the Highest and Lowest grades that it can find by apparently mashing those concepts together with the Most Helpful reviews to make sure that your contrasting viewpoints are worthwhile. It's still up to you to decide which thumb direction is right for you, but at least you have easy access to a good variety of opinion.

EDIT: Except, of course, now I can't find a link to the cool reviews page from the actual movie page within the Summer Movie Guide. :P It's very possible that these are manually generated one-off pages for all of the big name movies so that we can link to a review page from the Yahoo! home page, which makes them slightly less cool. But, still, it's a neat idea.

Other examples: The Incredible Hulk, Kung Fu Panda, Sex and the City. You can pretty reliably come up with the URL based on the movie title; I just can't figure out why this wouldn't be linked to from every page if it's actually programmatically generated.

So, now that you've got that fancy @ymail address, what are you going to do with it? One suggestion -- refamiliarize yourself with Y! Open Shortcuts. Notably:

Right there from your Firefox chrome (or any other Y! Search box), you can start composing an email to me, which I know is the one thing that you really wanted to do this weekend. Just in general, learn to love Open Shortcuts. Earlier this week, I realized that I was getting to our package documentation pages by typing out a well-formed URL that could totally be parametrized, leading to:

!set pkg http://ourpackagesystem.yahoo.com/by-package/%s/

Meaning I can get to where I want to go just by typing !pkg sports_webserver_thingy in my browser search box or on any other Yahoo! site, on any computer that I use. It's very powerful and probably woefully underutilized, so go on and fix that!

I might take Fridays to reiterate Y! Cool Things that I think are still cool and that haven't gotten love for a little while. But maybe that's me-being-late-for-a-concert talking.

This one'll be short, in the interest of posting before all the fun starts! We've opened up two new email domains, @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com, so that you can finally grab that email address that you've always been hoping for (because sean@rocketmail.com is easier to remember than xxXSean67723Xxx@yahoo.com). The domains apparently open up somewhere around noon PST today, and as far as I can judge, you need to set them up as new Yahoo! accounts. We'll find out together whether there are any options to merge accounts together or claim addresses from existing @yahoo.com accounts. So, just be sure to roll out around noon and stake your claim on this pristine email frontier before all the good names are taken again. :D

EDIT: Word of warning -- if you get an email address that's TOO popular (ie, sean@ymail.com), do keep in mind that you're opening yourself up to more potential spam, since you'll have an easily dictionary-guessed email address on a popular domain. We have pretty solid spam blocking, but it can only do so much.

EDIT #2: Here's the official signup link: http://new.mail.yahoo.com/addresses

EDIT #3: This, of course, means that you can use either http://ymail.com or http://rocketmail.com as shorthand for http://mail.yahoo.com, which is kind of handy. And, on that subject, does everyone remember that you can type http://ysearch.com instead of going to http://search.yahoo.com? Goooood.

Also, the official Yahoo! Mail blog post on this subject is available here.

FoxyTunes has always been a fun way to take advantage of the fact that you're living your life through your browser already -- news, games, email, messaging, friends 2.0 -- by using it to control all of your music players, too. What seems new, though, is the fancy integration with the Yahoo! Media Player that lets you control all of the music inside your browser as well as outside of it. When the new version of FoxyTunes notices that a page has direct links to music files, it can automatically instrument the page with the Media Player (saving you the trouble of relying on the site itself to do that, even though everyone should 'cause it's super easy), and also allow you to control the Media Player from standard FoxyTunes interface. It's a really impressive integration that does a great job of merging an one of our acquired companies with an innovative homegrown product. I guess there was some reason that we bought 'em, aside from their awesome name!

And in case you don't want a music toolbar going around instrumenting (ha, I just realized the pun, nice) your web experience all willy-nilly, you can disable the Media Player integration through the FoxyTunes Configuration.

While you're browsing around Yahoo! Sports to revel/wallow in the Celtics' 39-point demolition of the Lakers, consider browsing around for a few player profiles, too. It's easier than you might expect -- the Players subnav elements for the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL homepages expand into nifty autocomplete search boxes, making searching for players a slam dunk. Or...a quarterback sneak? A five-on-three powerplay goal? Definitely something sports related, that's for sure.