Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Some things are better when you can count on them being fresh and updated every day. This blog is presumably one of them, which...uh oh, apparently falls on me now. :D We'll miss you, JR! Another would be your daily crossword puzzle, or your daily sudoku, or whatever other games you crazy kids are wasting your time with these days (daily Rock Band?). Even when I fail to post on time, you'll still be able to get your daily gaming fix at Yahoo! Games, where I just noticed a fun Daily Games module towards the bottom of the page:

In future, calm your nerves with one of those if you find yourself breathlessly waiting for my inevitably tardy Y! Cool Thing update.

As if you don't have enough reasons to play with the Messenger 9 beta, there's now news that they've improved the Contact Database and given it a bit more Vitality©™^Parvue, than before.

(Ok, "Vitality" is an internal term and I'll probably be slapped for using it, but basically it's a way to manage your contacts outside of Yahoo. It's pretty damn cool, particularly when you remember that we've got an Address Book API you can use to fetch and store info to and from your Address Book, so it's even easier to keep (and fetch) all your contacts from one system.)

Hi, JR here with a bit of news that some folks may be wondering about.

So, as some may know, I'll be leaving Yahoo on June 20th. At that time, I'm also going to be tailing off posting to Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day. I'm not going to be closing it down.

Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day comes out of my pocket. I pay for the domain, I host the site, I do the maintenance and upkeep, and I pluck the weeds (ok, spammers). I fully intend to continue doing so for so long as I have a site.

I want to publicly thank my co-author Sean Montgomery for somehow getting trapped into this. Honestly, without him Y!CoolThing wouldn't be anywhere near as cool and useful. I also want to thank Amit Kumar, Sundar, Sridhar Ranganathan, and everyone else who's pitched in an article, comment or just stopped by to read. It's corny to say, but seriously, without you all, this wouldn't be possible.

Right, so pressing on, there's still plenty of cool to come, in fact, I'll be posting something about that later. See you then.

One of the primary complaints about the Facebook Newsfeed when it first came out was the sense of loss of privacy. Even though all of these nuggets of information really were already publicly available, it felt different to...well, make it so easy for stalkers. If they really care, they should at least have to try!

Over time, Facebook expanded the privacy options to give you fine-grained control over exactly what would and wouldn't show up in your feed, and everyone was pretty much happy. Everyone's doing feeds now, in fact, and we are no exception -- you can see our Vitality stream starting to show up in the new Yahoo! Messenger. Remembering the lessons that Facebook taught, though, we have all of our Vitality privacy controls available here (which also gives you a good idea about how many updates we're starting to provide, and how many more are possible when you think about all of our other properties). So don't start a Yahoo! Group complaining about our "newsfeed" or anything, please. :D

Well, firefox 3 is soon to be arriving in a cloud of angels. Ok, maybe not really angels so much as folks decked out in a mix of Threadless T's and ponytails, but let's not concentrate on that. No, instead, let's note that Del.icio.us has taken the wraps off of it's FireFox v.3 compatible plugin meaning that even with the Awesome Bar, Firefox can even be more awesome.

(Now if only they could get Greasemonkey out too, I'd so be on Firefox 3)

A couple years ago, Yahoo! Sports started making a concerted effort to start creating its own content instead of just consuming it from the news wires. We hired a battle-tested editor-in-chief from the LA Times, snagged well-known analysts from across the country, broke into the investigative journalism business (thanks, Reggie Bush!), beefed up our video content, and in general turned into an awesome editorial destination, in my opinion. Of course, as everyone in the blagosphere is aware, all the real journalism these days is happening in blogs.

Yeah, we've got those, too.

You might not have heard of the Y! Sports blogs yet, but...well, now you have. I just mentioned them. Each sport-specific blog, featuring distinct names like Ball Don't Lie and Big League Stew, is run by a host of characters that manage their blog just like any other guy out there -- posting about what interests them, opining about the big stories of the day, chattering with their readers in the comments sections. Rod Benson has a movement. Funny photos do not go un-captioned. All of our blog luminaries are on hand for live blogs surrounding the most important games. Even though the blogs are relatively new, they have a huge array of fun, eclectic, and irreverent content and a large following of dedicated sports fans. Some of the commenters have become well recognized enough for other commenters to mock their idiosyncrasies in completely unrelated contexts. That's when you know you've made it big.

It's gotten to the point where my friend remarked that he hits up all of the new blog content before he reads the rest of the stuff on our site, and when the rest of the stuff comprises the number 1 sports site online, that's saying a lot about this whole blogging thing.

No doubt about it, Flickr's got the love. In this case, they've improved how Flickr Groups can manage their photos. Now it's easier to share the photos you love with your group, and if I learned anything from sleep deprived mornings watching purple dinosaurs sing to kids, "Carnage Caring is Sharing" (Hey, I said I was sleep deprived. I can't be helped if I alter the words I'm singing along with.)

And that's what love is all about.

And 'ere we see the SearchMonkey in its natural habitat, monkeying around with Yahoo! search results! Let's observe!

Crikey, this one's a beaut! As you can see, the SearchMonkey lives in a Customize drop down menu on your Yahoo! Search result pages, but it has far-reaching effects on the whole search ecosystem. As it grows, it collects its own set of personalized Enhancements -- you can tell how old 'e is by counting 'em! This little fella right here is only five!

When a SearchMonkey comes across a search result that it knows how to handle, it doesn't hold back! You might see one add a useful Infobar that can pop related information into the page, or if the SearchMonkey actually owns the site, it can replace the entire result with a prettier, customized view (an Enhanced Result).

Sadly, the SearchMonkey can't actually reorder results on its own to favor results for which it has enhanced results, which would certainly give it a leg up in the wild! But it's an ever evolving creature and we'll be sure to keep a close eye on it! Blimey!

Well, looks like we're finally joining in the ranks of the rest of the net and opening up our Addressbook API. This is the same API that sites like Plaxo and LinkedIn have been using to magically get your data, and now you can too. It's currently using the old bbAuth access controls instead of the newer, shinier oAuth APIs that all the other cool kids love, but that's coming very soon.

The docs have all the details, so feel free to dig into them.

There are times when you just want to play with something and not have to worry about how it works. Maybe it's just to figure out if something makes sense or just to mock up a new page to see if someone else likes it.

Well, if you ever have that need, now there's a batch of YUI Wireframes you can use to do just that. The stencils are available in a slew of different formats and are all published under Creative Commons (naturally).