Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Members of our Exceptional Performance team aren't just here to optimize all of our internal sites -- they're trying to make the whole web a better place. That's why you get publicly-available tools like YSlow for grading and improving site performance, and now Smushit, a cool web-based image optimizer. As Chris Heilmann describes over at the Y! Developer Network, Smushit encapsulates all of the research that Nicole Sullivan and Stoyan Stefanov have put into file size optimization for images -- mostly removing metadata from a vast array of image types -- and sticks it an easy-to-use web interface (or Firefox extension, if you like) versus the myriad command line programs you'd have to use otherwise. So, Portage Daily Register, no more excuses for 1.4MB HTML-resized article images, y'hear?

I'm sure the last thing that you want to be looking at right now is a stock quote page, especially if it happens to be one that you own. However, if you do poke around, you might get lucky and spot the fairly awesome new stock ticker that Yahoo! Finance has been bucket testing for a while. I just happened to stumble across it, so I figure it's fair game to mention -- where you used to only have a boring page header, you can now get up-to-date scrolly information about any quotes that you've recently checked out, or about the market as a whole. It may not distract you from your imminent financial ruination, but at least you'll be able to quickly see that everyone else is in the same boat.

Not really sure how widespread the bucket is, so apologies if you're unable to see this feature.

Okay, as I said, I'm still not sure how I feel about the Start Wearing Purple marketing campaign, but...well, yeah, this Purple Prank is actually pretty funny.

I neglected to write about Yahoo! oneConnect when it first launched, because I sadly still do not own an iPhone and thus cannot test it out. However, I can at least appreciate it in the context of a phone feature with which I do have extensive negative experience -- text messaging. Because, in this day and age, it makes sense to pay $0.20 to send a couple hundred bytes? What? But oneConnect gracefully brings free Yahoo! Messenging to your iPhone, obviating the need for the ridiculous SMS plans, and layers on top of it far-reaching address book management and feed-type updates from all of your friends across a bunch of social networks. As advertised, it does exactly what you'd expect -- gives you one way to stay connected, without busting your wallet along the way. Now, that's a message I can appreciate. Read more about it on Yodel Anecdotal.

Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 (for Windows) has come out of Beta, and along with all of the standard polish is the entirely unexpected inclusion of an embeddable one-to-one chat widget, christened Pingbox™.

The Pingbox Studio is dead simple to play with, letting you manage up to 10 distinct Pingboxes™ that you can stick just about anywhere. There's sadly a limit of 100 concurrent users per Pingbox™, but it still provides an easy way for an owner of a small site to foster some direct communication with users (without exposing any Yahoo! contact information!). There's also pretty tight integration with the new Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 -- you're given new groups to manage all of the visitors to your Pingboxes™, and you can enable or disable the widgets directly from your messenger list. The Help page covers most everything else, or, hey, just ask above. It would be kind of nice if users could leave messages or if there was a way to force visitors to engage the widget before it activated (so that you wouldn't max out the 100 visitor cap solely on passive users drifting by), but I'm sure it'll evolve as more people get to play with it.

When Firefox introduced the ability to reorder tabs, that basically completed tabbed browsing for me. Being able to quickly context-switch between a bunch of persistently displayed pages was already a killer feature, but there would still be those frustrating times that I'd need to flip back and forth between two tabs that happened to be located on opposite ends of my browser window. Having control over how my tabs were organized not only reduced my risk of carpal tunnel but also gave me a more fulfilling sense of ownership over my work space.

Given that My Yahoo! is all about ownership of your space, it's fantastic that they've finally introduced the ability to reorder the tabs for all of your pages, too! If you've separated all of your personal modules into a bunch of separate pages to keep 'em organized, then you should definitely check it out.

You've no doubt already seen the blog blitz on the topic, but, still...the new Yahoo! Search+FoxyPlayer integration is pretty awesome, so have another blog post. I've been high on the Yahoo! Media Player, now known as the FoxyPlayer, for ages, because it's dead simple to integrate into a page and it makes listening to music in your browser so much easier. Heck, people don't even have to drop it into a page -- if you're using the FoxyTunes extension, we'll do it for you. And now, we've got you covered when you search on Yahoo!, too, by launching the FoxyPlayer and letting you listen to up to 25 free full length songs per month without needing to do a thing except press PLAY. I mean, you'll get 30 second samples after you run out, which is cool already, but 25 free full length songs just for searching? That's rockin', like the Foo Fighters. Be sure to check it out -- at the bottom of the page, in case you're not very observant -- and congratulations to the Search and Music teams for a killer feature.

More blog love:

• Yahoo! Search Blog
• Yodel Anecdotal
• TechCrunch
• Even Valleywag, and they kind of hate us.

On one more BOSS/Open Hack Day related note -- Sau Sheong Chang, our Engineering Director for South-East Asia, spent Open Hack Day playing around with the BOSS image search, and came up with a seriously cool photo mosaic program that'll generate a photo mosaic based on themed images found on the web. So, if you've ever wanted to demonstrate your love of Building D in the key of Yahoo!, there's some source code on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog that you'll probably be interested in.

I'll admit that there's a lot that I don't quite get about our Start Wearing Purple campaign, but I can at least appreciate location-aware photobikes. These babies made their premiere at the Open Hack Day, wheeling around the campus and soaking up some rays through their solar cells. They've now been dispersed around the world to explore bold new frontiers, provided that there's a bike trail or some sort of ramp. Through the magic of GPS receivers and Flickr geolocation, you can also track each bike's progress from within the Purple Pedals section of the marketing site. It's a fun idea as relates to moblogging, I just wish there were a better way to consume it.

NOTE: All of the uploaded photos have a ybike tag (thanks, devel-random), and you can actually pass the geoRSS feed through Pipes for a nice little map, even though it only has the last 20 images. And here's a slightly nicer version of just Amit's Bike's photos, though I'm having a few issues making that pipe truly configurable.

Even after an awesome weekend of mashup hacks and mashup music, we're apparently still in the mood. One of the great aspirations of BOSS was to enable smaller developers to really experiment with new, exciting approaches to search without needing the investment and infrastructure to develop an index as comprehensive as the one we've already put together, and we're putting our money where our mouth is with the BOSS Mashable Challenge. Presented in conjunction with Mashable, this contest will hopefully provide some of those crazy hackers out there the impetus to really sit down with our search data and create something original. It only takes, like, four hours, guys.