Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Huzzah! The long rumored Delicious 2.0 has launched to great fanfare, and yea, there was much rejoicing. Flying pigs world-wide stretch their wings. I would provide more insightful commentary (ha, like that ever happens), but I'm still playing around with it. Luckily, the guys and gals behind the curtain have got this one covered.

In the immortal words of Michael Arrington, "YAY!"

I can't imagine why the redesign took so long; it just zooms by in the video.

The search engine cuil launched with great fanfare earlier this week and...well, landed shortly afterwards. Swept up in the moment and wanting to demonstrate the simplicity of building new search applications on top of Yahoo! BOSS, Sam Pullara invented...Yuil.

Image credit to Amnesia

Taking the cuil frontend design and hooking it into Yahoo!'s search results took some indeterminate but presumably short period of hacking and resulted in a whole new search engine that a majority of commenters noted as being faster and more relevant than the $33-million-backed original. Sadly, Yuil was taken down, presumably due to the copyright and trademark issues (but aren't parodies protected? Maybe not if they work better than the source material...), but it will always have a special place in our hearts as a timely demonstration about how easy, effective, and hilarious Yahoo! BOSS applications can be.

My favorite: "Searching enough web pages"

EDIT: If you're curious, Yuil has been relaunched as 4hoursearch.

After MyBlogLog spruced up their widget, it only made sense that they'd spread the makeover love to their main site. Everything looks clean and new, with the rounded corners and gradients that we've come to expect, and I can still find all the things that need finding, so, hey, seems like a pretty good update! I actually can't even remember what it used to look like. It's that good.

Yahoo! Music Unlimited is finally shuttering the windows and locking up the doors, making way for the mass exodus over to Rhapsody's greener (financially?) pastures. While I'll miss Y!MU terribly, there are some perks -- we keep the same subscription price for the first year if we follow the official account migration, Rhapsody has a larger catalog and offers MP3 downloads, and I've heard good things about the Rhapsody player and the overall experience. I haven't made the switch yet, but I'm optimistic about it (aside from the increased price, but again, I'll have a year over which to evaluate whether it's worth it).

One unfortunate side effect of shutting down that branch of Yahoo! Music is that they would need to close down the licensing servers as well, meaning that any DRM-laden music files that you had purchased through Y!MU would become unplayable once your system settings changed enough to invalidate the license. Sure, you could burn the songs to a CD and rip them back, but it's a hassle, sound quality suffers, etc. This is why DRM is a terrible, terrible thing and I'm overjoyed that we're getting out of that business, but having us "brick" music that you had rightfully purchased is significantly less joy-inducing.

Obviously, that's not the cool thing. The cool thing is that the Yahoo! Music folk changed their mind. After hearing pretty significant public outcry over the prospect of entire music libraries being silenced, they re-evaluated their decision and offered up the following solutions:

• Full refunds on any purchased songs that would have died due to DRM.
• Investigation into replacing DRM-"protected" songs with glorious MP3s if desired.

Those are good options for the consumer, even if my first thought was, "Wow, that's gonna cost the company." Heck, it's even more impressive given that thought. So even though we had a misstep out of the gates, I'm proud that Yahoo! Music ended up putting back some of the "right" that's been missing from "digital rights management".

We have tons of enhanced search results that'll pop up for various types of search queries -- movies, athletes, landmarks, definitions, etc. However, they're almost always at the top of the page, even if they're not necessarily the most relevant result. We've gone in a slightly more interesting direction with our enhanced news results, throwing them into the mix with all of the other potential search results and ranking them accordingly. So, even though there's some interesting news about Amazon.com right now, it's probably not more important to you than going to the Amazon site and getting your shop on, and it'll show up appropriately further down in the list. If I were to put on my corporate hat (such a good hat), I might even go so far as to say that this move underscores our Open strategy in a big way -- we might be able to drive more traffic our way with a self-promoted internal result, but if there's another search result out there that's better, we'll put that first, no matter whose site it belongs to.

Yahoo! Maps have pretty much always given you the ability to save locations, so you don't always have to type out your home address or friend's place or that restaurant you really like. However, as a commenter on one of my email lists recently noted, it's somewhat inconvenient to click on the Add Location link and get kicked away from the map you're looking at. It's almost understandable because they give you the option to name the saved location and it doesn't actually have to be the address that you're viewing, but it's still inconvenient... especially if you're looking at the address you want to save... especially if you don't care about giving it a special name.

In those situations, though, there's a little-known feature (to me, at least) that might help: when you mouse over any of your recent locations in the address dropdown (click the down arrow next to the address box), you're given a set of options -- to make the selected address your default location, to save it, or to delete it. So if you type out the address that you want to save and type enter (which you'll presumably do anyway, since you want to go there), you can then add it to your locations by finding it in the list and saving it. If you make it your default address, that's the default view you'll get whenever you open Yahoo! Maps (or when you go to Yahoo! Local, or when you search for movie showtimes...). Or you can delete it when you realize that, say, you don't want to expose your home address to all the readers of your blog when you paste in the screenshot below.

As long as we're talking about things that have been around for a while but that we've never really posted about, I might as well mention Yahoo!'s very own Jeopardy Champion, Dave Sikula, who still writes for The Spark (hence the reminder about Jeopardy). Dave managed to get onto the show in late March and went on to win $15,000 during his one-night winning streak. Spending his days at Yahoo! as a Surfer/Search Editor certainly must have helped out, given that his job entails exploring and reporting on the vast array of arcane subjects represented across the web. It definitely speaks to the fun and diverse backgrounds that so many Yahoos bring to the table.

I have no particular skills with Javascript, but even I can understand that having your JS block your page from rendering isn't very good. I can also understand the well-written and interesting discussion of non-blocking Javascript downloads posted by Stoyan Stefanov at the YUI Blog, which clearly explains why and how Javascript can mess up how your page elements are downloaded and what you can do to get around it. The technique isn't really specific to Yahoo!, although you can use YUI Get to help pull down the includes, but it's awesome that we have a blog out there posting useful advice like this.

Before we invented picnic baskets, I bet that picnics were more a huge hassle than anything else. I mean, you'd grab all the supplies from your refrigerator, and then what? Throw the food into the back seat of your car and hope for the best when you arrived? What if you lose track of the mustard? What if you need to...er, crop your sandwich? Or rotate and resize the potato salad...?

There's room to improve the metaphor, but, hey, the new Picnik Photo Basket for Flickr uploads is enough improvement to handle for one day. Instead of having to crawl through all of your photos after they've been uploaded to individually launch Picnik for editing, you can now just press the "Save & Edit" button at the end of the upload flow and work with all of your new photos in a batch. It's not too functionally different, aside from saving you a click to each photo in your Photostream, but it certainly feels more convenient, more organized, and very easy to use, with minimal chance of losing the mustard.

Ah, yes, this is one of those throwaway posts, because it was Friday night and I was at a concert instead of keeping you up to date on cool Yahoo! stuff. My apologies.

However, my weekly horoscope says that "it's okay to take some downtime to regroup on Friday and over the weekend. In fact, the stars add exponential power to your recharging. Plug in!" Yup, I've got the weekend trip planned, so all the planets seem to be appropriately collinear. You can find all of your astrologic needs fulfilled over at the relocated Yahoo! Astrology, now living with Shine, because... um...women are superstitious? Whatever the reasons, you can still keep up to date with your (and your friends') fortunes, just under a new sign -- which says "Shine", located in the site header.

Things to look forward to in Sean's future: "On the 23rd, go as slowly as you need to, then indulge yourself on the 26th. You deserve it!" I can't hardly wait.