Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

There's always room for one more Flickr-related post! I've always thought that the concept of using machine tags in Flickr to associate photos to other chunks of structured data is really neat and super effective, as evinced internally by groups like Upcoming. I'd never paid much attention, though, to the fact that a bunch of external companies do the same thing. Last.fm, for instance, has excellent support for tagging Flickr photos with Last.fm concert IDs to add your photos to that concert's page. Flickr, the thoughtful folk that they are, returned the favor by introducing customized icons and fancy linkage for Last.fm tagged photos, completing the two-way integration and really improving the experience on both ends -- it's great to see us working in concert with other cool companies.

...is Open Hack Day! Internal hack days have been going strong, but there's nothing quite as cool as inviting external developers to our campus to geek out, eat pizza, play Guitar Hero, and come up with awesome projects using our APIs that we're too unimaginative or busy or close to the products to come up with on our own. We might not have Beck this year, but it should still be an awesome time. Read more about it at the YUI Blog.

This is just plain silly (and awesome) -- Jacob Seidelin created a Flickr photo browser modeled after a level of Wolfenstein 3D. That's the magic of having an open and easily consumable API: motivated and creative users will do all of the hard work for you. Sure, you may have never realized that you needed a way to merge your love of classic video games with your desire to look at pictures of puppies, but they'll get it done anyway.

Blast from the past! Here are some other Flickr tools.

I've got a MapMixer t-shirt, but it's hard to tell what else quantifiable has come out of the project. Not saying that it's not a super-cool idea and implementation, but that's sort of the problem -- I haven't seen it really getting integrated anywhere else across the network, and that's a shame.

As usual, Flickr comes charging to the rescue! I can't exactly tell if it's the same technology, but Flickr's custom tiling is at least a close spiritual successor. For big events like the Burning Man (previous link) or the Beijing Olympics, which are magnets for interesting geotagged photos but which take place in locales for which we don't have exceptional map coverage, the Flickr team can overlay Creative Commons licensed maps and add those critical visual cues to make it simple for users to place photos at the right spot. Again, I don't know how it's done on the backend, but it's still hugely gratifying to see such a good mapping idea finally getting into the mix.

After my own disappointing finish in a Guitar Hero competition, it's nice to read about a couple of other Yahoos managing to take home some hardware. Foosball is a cultural phenomenon at Yahoo!, and I'm sure our Yahoo! Search team was salivating when they heard that the Search Engine Strategies conference would be hosting a foosball tournament, pitting all of the big names in search against each other in the only competition that matters (pfft, global reach, whatever). The dynamic duo of Jake Rosenberg and Daniel Wong were unchallenged on their way to a gold medal finish over both Google and Microsoft, which when paired with our award for top search result relevance just goes to show that we've got that whole work/play balance down cold over here.

You may also recognize Daniel and Jake from the finals of the 2006 Foosapalooza, where we raised over $10,000 to donate to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Charitable work and search market dominance through foosball -- sounds like a winning plan to me!

It's seems like it's just about every week that I'm writing about Flickr releasing a new version of their slideshows, so, you know, it helps to keep things on schedule. This time, the slideshows are embeddable, and will play videos! In full screen, if you want! Hooray!

I'm not an iPhone user, but if I were, I bet that I would whine a lot about getting custom tailored interfaces to all of my favorite sites because my phone is so hip and cool and revolutionary that anyone who doesn't cater to my every design whim probably doesn't even deserve to live. I mean...that's the vibe I get, at least. :D What? No, I'm not at all envious because I don't even having a data plan on my 3-year-old flip phone, why do you ask? :P

Anyway, given the above, if I were an iPhone user, I would probably be mildly pleased that a few enterprising hackers in Yahoo! Search have rolled out an EXCLUSIVE, IPHONE-ONLY version of our search engine, with all of the Search Assist and Search Monkey and Enhanced Results that you know and love, but in a 320-pixel-wide column. Okay, sure, you can visit in your browser by going here, but, you know, it's no iPhone.

Wow, I'm sorry for missing two alternating days, guys. If it helps, imagine that JR is still around, and that he forgot to post on those days. Man. What a slacker.

The concept of using large crowds of users to solve difficult problems has always interested me, especially because we have so many large crowds of users here at Yahoo!. With Flickr's new geotagging Corrections, we're putting that concept to work by allowing users to adjust neighborhood boundaries when they geotag photos -- if we say that a particular latitude/longitude maps to Chinatown in San Francisco and a guy taking a picture at that street corner is clearly out of sight of any delicious Chinese restaurants, then why shouldn't we allow him to let us know? Users have the proper motivation to contribute their knowledge back to the system, because they'll get more accurate tagging of their photos, and there are more than enough geotagged photos to let us get a really solid sample size going. It's really awesome to see such complicated, useful, and yet totally tangential information coming out of a "simple" photo sharing site.

For a long while, Yahoo! Buzz had been limited to only covering a select group of authorized publishers. This allowed the team to keep pretty tight control over the quality and reliability of the sites hosting any interesting stories that we cared to link to, but it also meant that there were vast swaths of the web that simply would never get any attention from our service, cutting them off from a significant potential stream of users and keeping us from some really awesome content.

Well, be careful what you wish for, previously unbuzzable web sites-- the Yahoo! fire hose™ is now ready and waiting to crush your servers under a massive wave of traffic. As of today, any web page can be submitted to Yahoo! Buzz via our handy submission page. There's also a sizable collection of neat buttons to get you started, so that even your least web-savvy users can click you towards the coveted top module on yahoo.com. So, if you've ever felt like your servers are not quite enough on fire, start generating some Buzz today!

I'm used to being wowed by all of our enhanced results in Yahoo! Search, as they add a lot of visual flair to an otherwise utilitarian search results page (though adding SearchMonkey applications can help!). But when the results are already flashy, what can you do to wow the users? Maybe just make the results better, like we've done with our Olympics image search. As long as we know that you're searching for an athlete, or trying to find information about the Olympics, we'll now show a fun carousel of high-resolution images from Yahoo! Sports. It's the first time that I've seen this type of in-house search enhancement for images, so it's kind of a neat evolution.