Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Open Hack Day is now in full swing, or at least in half swing while people get their development and pizza-eating environments set up. Registration started early this morning, where I hear that Jerry and co. actually personally greeted oncoming hackers and handed them gift baskets (well, shwag bags), which may only be a rumor but still seems like a pretty awesome gesture. You can read all about exciting events as they roll in at hackday.blorg and Yodel Anecdotal as the day goes on, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, but then, a live video on Yahoo! Live is worth something like 24 pictures per second depending on your frame rate. That's right, we're streaming video from all of our classroom sessions and presumably from the floor of Hack Hotel (or whatever we're calling Building C while the hackers take up residence) once the actual hacking kicks off, which should help you stay up to date even if you missed out on registering. Happy Hacking!

"The print page is dead". Put your hands together for in-context printing built with "wysiwyg" in mind. Yahoo! India Maps print page just became better, faster and a lot cleaner. Visit Yahoo! India Maps at http://in.maps.yahoo.com, search for say "100 feet road, indiranagar, Bangalore to lido mall" and click on the "print" link in the left hand corner.

A helpful pop up shows the number of sheets you will need to print. The Map is also in wide screen (landscape), so what you see is indeed what gets printed. The Printout also gives useful tips on the distance, approximate time taken and local auto rickshaw fare, all of which will aid you in making sure you pay only what you need to pay to that friendly Auto driver (If you end up in India).

Just that Simple.
Subramanyan Guhan
Yahoo! India Maps Team.

Change is often difficult for Flickr users, so I hope they can somehow manage to persevere through Flickr's home page redesign. In a concession to the more conservative folks out there, the switch-over is currently being offered in an opt-in fashion, selection of which cues a brief transition screen complete with cute animations and MIDI music. Heh, that's Flickr for you. And when you actually do make it over to the new hotness...well, it's actually pretty nice. Nothing enormously drastic has changed, but modules are more interactive, most everything is collapsible, and you get a few more feed-type updates. I think they've also done something fun with stats (at least making them easier to get to), but I'll need to renew my Pro account to make sure.

If all else fails, at least you might get some donuts out of it.

The question came up around the office today about how people were using Yahoo! Buzz, that social news aggregator known mostly for aiming massive quantities of traffic at unsuspecting websites through its Yahoo! frontpage integration. I'm not a heavy Buzz user, as it turns out, so I was kind of surprised by one of the feaures that got called out -- apparently the Related Stories are way more relevant and engaging than I ever knew. After glancing at this note about the fact that Sarah Palin doesn't like interviews, I've also found out that the rock group Heart is apparently composed of Democrats and that Jon Stewart is, of course, still hilarious. The fact that these Related Stories really are interesting as well as being on topic allows for a Wikipedia-like exploration down all of these little rabbit holes, which gives me a compelling reason to visit the Buzz site itself (instead of just consuming the stories from the frontpage) that I'm not sure I had before.

I can't tell exactly when this happened, but I'm pretty sure that the Neighbors feature of Yahoo! Local at some point was expanded to all the rest of those neighborhoods out there (not just San Carlos and Sacramento, which had been the initial beta sites). I'm still working on getting a handle on how I'd use this product, but as of right now, it at least seems like an interesting starting point if you want to make any general suggestions or start up some discussion that pertains to your immediate region. The suggestions feature works a lot like our feedback pages, letting you vote suggestions up or down or add your own, and the discussion portion is basically like your standard message board, just tied to where you live. I've yet to figure out if I really care enough about my community to get involved in the minutiae of beautification projects and coffee shop recommendations, but then again, I was compelled to contribute a comment about Salsa dancing in Mountain View when I saw a related post go by, and maybe others will feel the same.

With so many users visiting Yahoo! News, the News team has access to tons of interesting data points from which they can determine popularity. On their Most Popular page (er, by which I mean, the page containing all of the popular stories, not the page on their site that, for instance, would have been voted Prom King), they can tell you which stories are getting the most views, which photos have been emailed around the most, what people are recommending to their friends, et cetera. One kind of neat thing is that they can also tell you all of those things for yesterday, or the day before, or a week ago, via the Archive module towards the bottom of the page. So if you've been busy at work and need to catch up on all of the top stories from Wednesday, the Most Popular Archive from Sept. 3rd is here for you. Sadly, it looks like there's only a month worth of pages available, but it's still a cool way to leaf through a few slices of time.

As I'm sure you've heard, BOSS is our fantastic search webservices platform that gives you a flexible and powerful interface through which you can Build your Own Search Service, hence the name. BuildaSearch is a new application that allows you to build your own search service, built on top of BOSS, which...er, as we've stated...is designed to do exactly that. It's like a WYSIWYG editor for BOSS, I suppose? Frankly, I just hope that there's a market here for me to develop the some sort of highly customizable template to generate inputs into the BuildaSearch interface, which could then render a new personalized BOSS-based search engine. "BuildaBuildaSearch", I'm thinking. Has a nice ring to it.

Check out the Y! Search blog for a few search engines built on top of BOSS that are slightly less meta.

With the release of Google's new highly-performant Chrome browser, it remains clear that there's a massive amount of investment behind Javascript-based applications. So it's neat that we still have one of the best Javascript libraries available on the web. Of course, the best way to demonstrate the power of the browser? Remakes of classic arcade games. Waka waka waka.