Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

I can't believe that we've never written about the Yahoo! Music Nissan Live Sets yet, especially given that they just launched themselves a big redesign. I mean, really. Way to slack off.

So, let's make up for lost time! Nissan Live Sets is an original production from Yahoo! Music that convinces really top-notch artists (you can take a look at the archive here) to come over to our studio and do a live show that we'll broadcast across our site. These are big names presented to you twice a month with exceptional production quality, for free! Which is pretty neat. The Yahoo! Music guys recently redesigned the pages to present an in-line video experience with bigger photos and more prominent blogging, plus all that awesome live music that you know and love, but that we apparently don't write about.

But now we do! Huzzah.

If you're one of those people who carefully plots and plans road trips instead of just reveling in their spontaneity (and eventual hunger, and engine failures due to lack of gasoline...), this just might be the feature for you. Finding points of interest -- Burger King! Shell! A Best Buy so you can buy a wireless headset! -- along a route has long been a capability of Yahoo! Maps through the Dash navigation system, but now you can also pull that information out of the Yahoo! Local API. Now, what I'd really love is for Yahoo! Maps to add this feature to their product roadmap. It's driving me crazy not to have such a nice utility front and center. Honk once if you agree!

The great secrets of life are typically inscrutable -- none can scrute them. The great secrets of Yahoo! Live, on the other hand, are passingly mentioned in blog posts about chickens. Verily, from this post, you have learned that you can double-click on the featured video on the Yahoo! Live home page to put it in full-screen mode. Go forth and use that knowledge wisely.

Yeah, I'm not sure why you can only do that on the home page, and not from any live channel.

I'm not a huge fan of advertising -- I know, seriously, I'm in the wrong industry -- but I can understand the benefits. If I can support a developer's hard work by simply donating some of my attention to some company trying to sell me stuff, especially if the only other option is to have it as a paid service, that ends up sounding pretty reasonable to me. My patience is tested a bit more by particularly invasive experiences, but otherwise, I'm just getting a cool product for "free", and I can't complain about that.

So, no complaints about Yahoo! Games' new ad-supported downloadable games, which let you play through games that were previously pay-to-download by instead just being willing to sit through pre-roll and post-roll ads. The option is still there to pay for the game and thus remove the ads, so all you getting is a different, more accessible avenue for enjoying your Diner Dash and Text Twist. The integration itself is a bit jarring on the post-roll, as far as I tried out, but in general it seems like a decent price to pay for not having to pay a price.

One of my standard add-ons to Firefox is an extension that allows you to select a text URL on a webpage and use the context menu to open it in a new window. It's just convenient to take a piece of text that semantically screams "THIS IS A LINK" and actually make it actionable.

Map+ does the same thing, but with addresses. It's really, really cool.

Sample address, for post-install fun: 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA

From this YUI blog post -- thanks!. I might steal a few more posts from there later.

"If you want a job done right, do it yourself." It's a nice sentiment, but in the world of, say, search engine development, doing it yourself is a daunting prospect. I mean, have you tried to crawl the Internet on your own? Index the billions of interesting sites out there? Parse pages for keywords, figure out what relevancy means, come up with a compelling name with two 'O's in it (I mean, hey, it worked for Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft)? There are tons of people out there with good ideas about how to revolutionize search online, but their ideas will never amount to anything without the infrastructure behind them.

"If you want a job done right, do it yourself, and let us help." That's the idea behind BOSS (Build your Own Search Service), which offers up a fast and convenient interface to our search results, where you're not only allowed but actually encouraged to remix and reproduce them in any way that you like. As far as my understanding goes, the general model is that you'd take a query on your own search site, and 1) perform some number of interesting BOSS queries to fill out a collection of interesting sites to consider (based on vanilla Yahoo! search results in chunks of up to 50 to whichever queries you provide through BOSS), 2) apply whatever metrics or extra information you have about those sites in order to reorder the results to your liking, 3) ???, and 4) PROFIT! Or display your own interpretation of unique and relevant search results, but that probably converges pretty well with profiting.

A somewhat separate project is BOSS Custom, which is a beefed up custom site search with a much deeper level of access to our underlying search technologies. That's my understanding, at least. This one is drawing a ton of interesting partners (maybe that's why TechCrunch is giving us a break today) and hopefully that level of openness with the levers and pulleys of Yahoo! Search will also leak out to BOSS Standard. I'd love to see us offer APIs that expose a few more details about backlinks, site reputation, or whatever other interesting things compose our secret search stew.

So, in general, this is a pretty cool announcement about letting you, the boutique search developer, be the BOSS. Also, it's an amazing logo.

EDIT: I like this post, which discusses some of the origins behind and future plans for BOSS.

Geography seems to always make things interesting. After Flickr added geolocation, they ended up with, among other things, a new way to explore photos as well as to categorize places, all in a pretty little map. Prospective visitors to cities and landmarks instanly had a virtual tourguide at their fingertips. Localizing news articles allows you to find the current information that's most relevant to you. Stratifying poll results based on geographic region gives a lot of insight into how opinions are trending across the country.

Or sometimes, you just want to know where your online associates are from. Enter People Map, which lets Yahoo! Group members stick themselves onto a map...er, of people in the group (blog post here). In addition to just being able to find out a little bit more about the makeup of your group, you can also start using it to, say, plan get-togethers based on the most central location for everyone, or ask questions through the map and see if people living close to you are giving the same sort of answers. It's not a huge feature, but it seems like it could be useful.

The more interesting point for me from this is that the People Map was a product of the newly formed Group Labs, which is dedicated to putting together fun little Group hacks for people to play around with. It's nice to see exploratory innovation given prime real estate on one of our old and established properties.

Yahoo! Messenger has a ton of emoticons, almost to a fault -- say that your hip friend uses an awesome emoticon that you've never seen before, how are you supposed to figure out the correct keystroke combination by which to reproduce it for all of your buddies? Well, kind of like you'd expect -- mouse over any emoticon (in 9.0 Beta, at least) and the plaintext version will pop up at your cursor, making sure that you're never :-/ again.

Yahoo! Mail has a ton of useful keyboard shortcuts, helpfully enumerated here. There actually are even a ton that I wasn't even aware of, as I was recently reminded by some props given over an internal mailing list (thanks, dev-random, and Miles for forwarding it on!). For you heavy folder users, don't bother with that convenient "Move" dropdown menu, which you can conveniently open up by pressing 'd' (for dropdown! Maybe) and where you can conveniently select a folder using your up and down arrows. Instead, move a message into one of your first nine folders by simply using the {1-9} keys, with the mapping listed on the "Move" dropdown. It's as easy as one click! Or...four click! Or six click! I mean, it really depends on which folder we're talking about...

Sometimes, you just want to listen to some music. You don't want 30-second tracks, you don't want the hassle of trying to download it, you don't want to have to deal with DRM or other vastly consumer-unfriendly inventions from the RIAA. You might not even want to listen to it again after the first time, but some guy mentioned it and you'd like to see what all the fuss is about.

Sometimes, a tool just does everything right, and this time, it happens to be ours. Check out this Yahoo! Music music blog, about a cool new song from a newly solo musician. The linked song can be played right there in the page, using the always impressive Yahoo! Media Player, but it's actually a full track instead of a truncated sample. You can listen to up to 25 full songs (over some undisclosed period of time -- EDIT: apparently a month), which is perfect because you really ought to buy something after that many plays anyway. I haven't switched to Rhapsody yet (still waiting on our official switch-over from Y!MU), but whenever I do, I'll be able to listen to this song as much as I want, and, hey, I'm encouraged to do so because I finally have a chance to judge in full how much I like it. It's lightweight, hassle-free, and works exactly as I would want it to --  that's music to my ears.