Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Whenever I watch the nightly news, I invariably end up a bit depressed. There's some other war going on. The economic crisis is deepening. We're once again running low on Nintendo Wiis. You really get to thinking that nothing good is happening in the world, unless you're watching the Daily Show in which case you can at least have a good laugh about it.

Obviously, that's no way to feel as we enter the holiday season, so maybe we need some slightly more uplifting viewing material. Enter Good News Now, a Yahoo! News production that brings together clips of all of the awesome stories that actually are getting covered in the news when you're not looking. Today I learned about a grandmother who has cut out tens of thousands of coupons to send to US troops, and a man with cerebral palsy who fulfilled his dream to walk all of the holes on the PGA Tour, and, by gosh, it just makes your day a little bit brighter. As they say, there's no news like good news, and Good News Now will give you a steady supply from now until New Year's.

The quite cool Glue™ pages from Yahoo! India Search have gotten so much positive buzz that it was only a matter of time before we brought them over to the States. You can definitely tell that a few things got changed in the translation, though. The general idea of Yahoo! Glue remains the same, of course: we want to "glue" together all of the most relevant content for a high level query in one place, using sources from all over the web. However, while the Y! India Search version is dynamic, the new version takes the interesting route of apparently being manually constructed per query, though I'm sure it's algorithmically aided. I can see that this would lead to fewer false positives for results, but it doesn't seem to scale as well; it really makes me wonder if we'd eventually open this up as a collaborative wiki-style project (which, I dunno, sounds pretty awesome to me). You'll also immediately note that the US Glue generally doesn't include web search results, I suppose because it's trying to give you exactly the information that you need, instead of wasting space guessing at it. Regardless, the end result is still compelling as a destination for general information about a topic, and I can't wait to see where it goes from here.

One of the knocks on BOSS has been that, at the end of the day, it's still just a list of search results. Given the overall lack of volume restrictions, it's an infinitely long list, sure, with a ton of useful extraneous information like news and images, but it's still hard to really get clever with a mere collection of links. The BOSS team is working on revising that starting today, with the launch of their Key Terms. Instead of just seeing a list of links, you can now get back an associated group of key terms per link that tells you exactly what the Yahoo! Search engine thinks are the important parts of the page. For change.gov, for instance, you'll see key terms like "transistion team", "Barack Obama", "inauguration", and so on. Instead of just knowing that you got a link back based on some query, now you can figure out why you got that link back and exactly what the link is all about, and it seems like you could start to do some insanely cool stuff with that data.

Sometimes it's all about the eye candy, no more so than when all of the words are in a language that I don't understand. That's about the best summary of Yahoo! Pop that I can give, as I am not a Spanish language speaker but I do admittedly have a weakness for pictures of attractive women. The "Pop" stands for Popular, as all of the presented images are tied to the top search terms of the day (across the Espanol search site, I believe), giving you a quick visual way to stay on top of current trends. You also get some of the top news stories and Flickr photos of the top search mover, but it's mostly about the pretty pictures in the main module. Today, for instance, we can see that seven of the top ten search queries are for female celebrities, driving home a certain point that really works best when put to music.

And trust me, "crazy" was not the first adjective that came to mind, though it does share many of the same letters. It's also pretty..."shifty".

We're certainly all feeling the crunch, particularly if you happened to have, say, purchased a chunk of company stock yesterday and logged on this morning to see that the market had "normalized" your employee discount for you. So while you sit on that investment for a few more years, you might as well make your liquid capital go as far as it can by hunting down some online deals, and by golly have we got a site for that.

As Greg Hintz explains over at Yodel Anecdotal, despite the sad economic state, there's still a lot of great shopping to be had online -- certainly better to blithely pass credit card numbers back and forth than to have to physically watch your money leave your wallet at some mall. And the massive quantity and variety of online bargains means that you can probably actually save a buck or two, by clipping (or copy/pasting?) online coupons, jumping on single-day bargains, and generally keeping track of all the best sales. If nothing else, even if you're not in the mood to buy, you should appreciate the extra attention devoted to Woot captions, such as today's gem:

Looking for a top-of-the-line, high-powered system with the latest multimedia features – all for under $300? Keep dreaming. You’re lucky you even found this Everex GS3005 desktop PC...

Yahoo! BrowserPlus has opened its doors to the Internet at large -- officially as of next week, but you can mess around with it now -- and in celebration, I've written the simplest, most hideous (from a Javascript perspective...I'm terrible with Javascript) interactive speech input box that you could ever imagine, with the help of the extremely useful sample code. Seriously, if I can do it, anyone can, which I suppose is the magic of BrowserPlus -- packaging up a bunch of useful tools that you usually wouldn't find in a browser and making them easily accessible through just a bit of Javascript. Definitely check it out, and try out the Speak & Spell below! Because otherwise I just wasted 30 minutes of my life.

(You'll need to install BrowserPlus, obviously. And it's only available for Mac OSX and Windows, sorry.)

Try out Speak & Spell

For a social news site, Yahoo! Buzz always seemed surprisingly...not social. Vote aggregation counts for something, I suppose, but I never really felt like I was interacting with my fellow Internet user whenever I stopped by, which sadly also means there was much less reason to stop by altogether.

But that's all done with after the introduction of Comments for each story, where Yahoo! users can finally air their articulate and reasoned opinions, contributing to the overall betterment of Internet discourse! *cough* Oh, Yahoo! users... Irrespective of the quality of commenting, though, at least you finally have a place to let yourself be heard. Also, as far as I noticed, the Buzz audience is ridiculously more conservative than the Digg audience (though that's not a hard title to achieve), so, you know, there's our innovation right there.

Buzz is surfacing Updates based on your Profiles social graph, too, if you happened to have set that up. Feel free to read a bit more about it over at Yodel Anecdotal.

We mentioned a few cool things about how Yahoo! Mail handles attached photos in a previous Y! Cool Thing, but did anyone actually take the time to check it out? I know I hadn't -- c'mon, JR wrote it, I was planning to get to it eventually -- and now that I have, I realize that we'd left out mentioning explicitly in the post the part that would hook me the most.

Yup, lightboxes.

I mean, I love lightboxes. And Yahoo! Mail will allow you to pop up a lightboxed slideshow of any set of pictures attached to an email message, with easy-access download links for each one as you click through. I simply cannot believe that we didn't call that out the first time around.

In the process of moving, I've decided that I don't like it one bit. All the heavy boxes, trips back and forth, and awkward moments where you're in one house but your shampoo is in the other, it really starts to get you down. So, the obvious solution is to consolidate! Instead of carrying around cook books, search for recipes online. I should be able to ditch that telephone in favor of a Yahoo! Messenger Phone In line. And instead of an awkward television, why not watch full episodes of your favorite shows on Yahoo! TV?

Yup, it's another of those fun partnerships that we occasionally do, this time shacking up with Hulu to get access to a huge variety of their shows. For 30 Rock, for instance, we have five full episodes and hundreds of other clips, with Oprah on the way later in the week. I was mildly worried that we were just offering a stripped down version of their content, but it looks like we have all of the same clips as they do for the couple shows that I checked, meaning you can get all of that TV show goodness in that Yahoo! TV page layout that you know and love.

Now, if I can figure out some way to get rid of my bed and cabinets, too, by replacing them with online equivalents, then this next move should go much smoother.

At 3am, I finally make it back to my new rented house after finishing up nearly the last bit of moving that's been occupying me for the past week (sorry about the lack of updates, folks!). My focus should be on the futon that I still need to construct so that I have something to sleep on tonight, but instead, my overriding thought is, "Shoot, I have no idea what to do about voting tomorrow." Most important election of my life thus far, and I don't even know where my polling place is!

Right when I visit the Yahoo! top page, I get this:

Which, you know, seems like a pretty thoughtful thing to ask. When I click on "No", I'm redirected to an elections page that prompts me to enter my address in order to find my designated polling place. After I jot that down (and glance at the embedded map showing me the relative locations of my house and the opportunity to fulfill my civic duty), I'm also able to pretty quickly find the ID requirements for California voters, which I had also been worrying about.

It's just nice to see my company looking out for me. :) Good luck voting today!