Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

I've mentioned before that Flickr is doing exceptionally creative stuff with their geotagging data (like correcting neighborhood boundaries), but now they've added pretty pictures! And I'm a sucker for those. Given that all of the geotagged photos have Where On Earth identifiers to describe various magnitudes of regions (town, country, etc), the Flickr guys realized that they could use the corresponding photo locations for each WOE ID to sketch out a graphical represenation of the boundaries of that area. There's a lot of technical details presented via delicious ice cream analogies, but just seeing one of the programatically generated outlines gives you a pretty solid idea about how neat this is. So, feel free to, for instance, mess with Texas by uploading a few geotagged photos of your own.

I hadn't checked out the Yahoo! News Political Dashboard for quite some time, fairly content in my assumption that the electoral landslide for my preferred candidate was all but guaranteed. I'm almost wishing that I hadn't given it another go. The Dashboard now has a nifty "Create Your Scenario" option that puts you in control of the electoral college, flipping states left and right between, er, Left and Right. Suddenly, anything can happen! What if California takes a cue from Arnie and decides that Republican governors (and Senators) aren't a bad idea afterwards? What if New England rings in their Fall festivities by turning red along with the trees? What if Newt Gingrich is right and, like, every single state goes against all current polling data and votes for McCain? (okay, seriously, Gingrich, what the heck) The possibilities are endless and it's up to you to explore 'em. Just be sure to get out on Nov. 4th and do the one thing that'll really affect the outcome of the election: vote!

It's so rare that we develop applications only for Safari users over here -- usually we forget they exist and then have to frantically rework features to eventually get them a functional product (sorry, drag & drop users in Fantasy! :P). So I'm sure you guys were loving Inquisitor, a cool Safari-only browser plugin that ties together standard autocompleting search with common results personalized especially for you. Finally, Yahoo! giving you the exclusivity that you expect as a Mac user!

Well, so much for that. Inquisitor has now opened up for Firefox and IE as well, letting all of the rest of us into your little club. It's actually really cool to be able to finally try it out -- kind of creepy when it starts making recommendations based on sites I've visited (it knows all!), but really useful, too (and I think it's all local, so hopefully no weird privacy stuff going on). In Firefox 3, it'll have to fight it out with the Awesome Bar, which seems to have more extensive history matching but doesn't include web searches, but it seems like a no-brainer utility for Firefox 2 and IE.

Yahoo! Groups has continued to expand their Grouplets suite with the addition of eight new varieties: Address Book, Birthday List, Favorites, For Sale, Give Away, Group Profile, Jobs, and Places Map. Their intial foray into these mini embeddable group "applications", the People Map, was cute but seemed a bit more limited in appeal, while these new guys are extremely general-purpose and useful, especially once you peek under the covers.

At a high level, Grouplets are just another way to organize information about your group -- they all seem to be list/entry based, and you have the option to view all of them in a Map, Table, or List view -- but they do provide a structured way for users of your group to input the data, based on the particular template. That's all well and good, but the real fun happens when you notice the Settings option on your Grouplet. If you start messing with the Form Settings, you quickly realize that you have complete control over which form elements users can interact with on that Grouplet. My Birthday Grouplet now requires an Address and instead of entering a Birthday, I'm asking for a Monkey. You know, just because I can. It actually seems like a really powerful editor that I was exceptionally surprised to find lurking beneath the stock templates.

If you have a group, definitely try messing around with some Grouplets in the Grouplet manager -- append /grouplets/manager to your group URL (eg, something like: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/YOUR_GROUP_NAME/grouplets/manager). They're still quite beta, but in an exciting, think-of-the-possibilities way.

When planning a successful college football game-day experience, the most important factor is...that your team wins. I mean, seriously. That's what matters here.

Right below dominating the opposition, however, is preparation. Where can you flip open your trunk and set up a raucous, drunken tailgate? At which local bar can you drown your sorrows after a rough four quarters? Do you even really want to waste money on a seat in some run-down stadium, or should you just kick back with a cold one on your couch at home? (note: that's a trick question. Go the game, man.) For all of these venue related questions, Rivals.com presents their Fans' Guides. Nearly all of the major Div. I stadiums are covered in loving detail, providing historical color, restaurant recommendations, local attractions, and more. With a bit of research, you can make a productive day out of even the most unappealing destinations.

There are nearly 70 themes available to choose from on My Yahoo!, but you get the sense that if it's really going to be YOUR Yahoo!, shouldn't you have a bit more say in what it looks like? Now, for me, that's never been a serious issue because all of the themes rock a bit harder than most things I would come up with and I've been pretty happy with the ones that I've settled on. However, for those of you that are more hands-on, My Yahoo! now grants you the power to design custom colorizations on top of their themes. The interface is actually pretty cool, in the sense that it updates the entire page in-line to give you a good sense of what you'll get, and you can pick any theme as the base in case you just want to make slight modifications (as long as you have fewer than 9 tweaks you want to save).

Now, it's sometimes better to leave important style decisions such as these to the professionals who develop the standard My Yahoo! themes, but we're no longer going to stop you if you need to...ahem, express yourself, like below.

One of the key components of our overall social strategy has rolled out today: the new Yahoo! Profiles. Feel free to roll on over and set yours up, kick the tires, see how things work. There really isn't much to do yet aside from profile yourself and reconnect with some of your friends, but this is the grand opening of a central location for your Updates stream and those Contacts will certainly come in handy later when they're filtering your mail or popping up on your new Yahoo! homepage. But just baby steps for now.

Oh, though there is a pretty sweet inline photo cropper when you upload a new image. That's pretty neat.

Here's a Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day where you can play along at home! In fact, given a few technological limitations of my phone, I kinda need you to.

As noted in last week's Product Pulse over at Yodel Anecdotal, we've enabled voice-activated search for certain Nokia and Blackberry phones through our oneSearch and Yahoo! Go platforms. Just mutter a query into your headset and you'll get right to the information you need, or so the theory goes. Given that I don't have either of those phone types, I'm a bit out of luck, but I'd love to hear a bit more about how well this feature works. So, a challenge to you, intrepid reader: if you have a Nokia Series 60 phone, try yelling at the oneSearch shortcut, available at m.yahoo.com/shortcut; or if you have Yahoo! Go 3.0 on your Blackberry or Nokia 40/60 Series phone, give it a little shout-out. Let me know if voice search is everything you hoped and dreamed, or if it's just another reason for passers-by to give you weird looks as you scream "Sandwich shops!" into your mouthpiece.

The winners have been announced for the BOSS Mashable Challenge (mentioned a month ago here), with the Grand Prize going to KallOut. As far as I can tell, the integration with BOSS is pretty trivial -- just pulling vanilla web results into their KallOut framework -- but it's a cool enough application with at least a tenuous connection to Yahoo! so that I don't mind mentioning it here. As a general idea, take a look at the Y! Shortcuts that pop up when you click on Barack Obama's name in this article -- you get an in-page popup with relevant news, search results, images, and so on. KallOut does roughly the same thing, except across your entire OS (provided your OS is a Windows varietal...), allowing easy access to search data, videos, maps, or whatever else seems relevant to the text you've selected in your browser, email client, document editor, and what have you. If you're interested in trying it out, you can download it here -- just be sure to change that default search engine to Yahoo! BOSS. *grin*

Gas prices have been steadily on their way down over the past few months (er, thanks for that, recession), but it's still a pretty sizable hit to your wallet every time you fill up the ol' tank. Short of investing in a hybrid/electric car, reducing your consumption by carpooling or driving less, or at least listening to a certain presidential candidate when he suggests keeping your tires fully inflated, you might as well find the cheapest places to buy gas, and that we can help with. We've had a little GasBuddy enhanced result for a while, but it's received a significant upgrade in equal proportions to how annoying gas prices have become. So, you know, it's a pretty significant upgrade, then.