Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Geography seems to always make things interesting. After Flickr added geolocation, they ended up with, among other things, a new way to explore photos as well as to categorize places, all in a pretty little map. Prospective visitors to cities and landmarks instanly had a virtual tourguide at their fingertips. Localizing news articles allows you to find the current information that's most relevant to you. Stratifying poll results based on geographic region gives a lot of insight into how opinions are trending across the country.

Or sometimes, you just want to know where your online associates are from. Enter People Map, which lets Yahoo! Group members stick themselves onto a map...er, of people in the group (blog post here). In addition to just being able to find out a little bit more about the makeup of your group, you can also start using it to, say, plan get-togethers based on the most central location for everyone, or ask questions through the map and see if people living close to you are giving the same sort of answers. It's not a huge feature, but it seems like it could be useful.

The more interesting point for me from this is that the People Map was a product of the newly formed Group Labs, which is dedicated to putting together fun little Group hacks for people to play around with. It's nice to see exploratory innovation given prime real estate on one of our old and established properties.

Yahoo! Messenger has a ton of emoticons, almost to a fault -- say that your hip friend uses an awesome emoticon that you've never seen before, how are you supposed to figure out the correct keystroke combination by which to reproduce it for all of your buddies? Well, kind of like you'd expect -- mouse over any emoticon (in 9.0 Beta, at least) and the plaintext version will pop up at your cursor, making sure that you're never :-/ again.

Yahoo! Mail has a ton of useful keyboard shortcuts, helpfully enumerated here. There actually are even a ton that I wasn't even aware of, as I was recently reminded by some props given over an internal mailing list (thanks, dev-random, and Miles for forwarding it on!). For you heavy folder users, don't bother with that convenient "Move" dropdown menu, which you can conveniently open up by pressing 'd' (for dropdown! Maybe) and where you can conveniently select a folder using your up and down arrows. Instead, move a message into one of your first nine folders by simply using the {1-9} keys, with the mapping listed on the "Move" dropdown. It's as easy as one click! Or...four click! Or six click! I mean, it really depends on which folder we're talking about...

Sometimes, you just want to listen to some music. You don't want 30-second tracks, you don't want the hassle of trying to download it, you don't want to have to deal with DRM or other vastly consumer-unfriendly inventions from the RIAA. You might not even want to listen to it again after the first time, but some guy mentioned it and you'd like to see what all the fuss is about.

Sometimes, a tool just does everything right, and this time, it happens to be ours. Check out this Yahoo! Music music blog, about a cool new song from a newly solo musician. The linked song can be played right there in the page, using the always impressive Yahoo! Media Player, but it's actually a full track instead of a truncated sample. You can listen to up to 25 full songs (over some undisclosed period of time -- EDIT: apparently a month), which is perfect because you really ought to buy something after that many plays anyway. I haven't switched to Rhapsody yet (still waiting on our official switch-over from Y!MU), but whenever I do, I'll be able to listen to this song as much as I want, and, hey, I'm encouraged to do so because I finally have a chance to judge in full how much I like it. It's lightweight, hassle-free, and works exactly as I would want it to --  that's music to my ears.

Right, so you've got a wordpress blog, and it's the cat's pajamas. Ok, granted, if you're wrapping a cat up at night in PHP code you really need to get out more, but understandably, you're probably pretty excited about it.

Well, mostly excited.

You're probably looking at it and thinking "Gosh, I wish that this here nifty blog used a light weight CSS layout mechanism that allowed for easy, standardized presentations." (Yeah, between that cat thing and spouting stuff like that, you REALLY need to get out more.) Well, thanks to the diligent efforts of the best coiffured engineer in YDN, you now have the ability to use YUI Grids in your Wordpress blog.

It's been a while since I've played with Kickstart -- honestly, it's just because I haven't been looking for a job and therefore haven't needed to leverage my connections! And I'm also not looking for a job now! Man, it's hard to talk about recruiting social networks without digging yourself into a hole.

One of the greatest assets of Kickstart, as it was first described to me, was the way that it was intended to help you navigate your network to figure out the best people to connect to if you were looking for a job or looking for more information about a company. Kickstart hasn't quite taken off yet, but they have added in that concept of trying to figure out the best people to talk to based on your affiliations. Whenever you see a profile, you'll also see a little meter next to the user's picture indicating how similar you are, tying in which schools you've gone to, where you've worked, if you're friends, etc. Whenver you conduct a search for a company, school, or affiliation, you'll be presented with a ranked list of Kickstarters, indicating how likely those people would be to kickstart you into that company/school/affiliation, letting you know who you ought to befriend right away. You're also presented on the homepage with people with whome you might want to connect, based on how much you have in common. It's still pretty rudimentary, but it's getting towards that vision of what Kickstart can really help you achieve, which I've always been absolutely in love with.

It's always cool when I mention a feature in passing and it garners a mention on an official blog a few days later. Of course, the integration of Alpha _beta on top of the Australian news site has absolutely nothing to do with my post, but it's still nice to feel prescient once in a while. Mostly, Alpha _beta is augmenting the Australian news search results with photos (both from Image Search and from Flickr) and actual web results, so it's nothing hugely different from the regular application, but it certainly does make the results look prettier and feel a bit more comprehensive.

This will seen exceptionally shallow of me, but while it's awesome that we've launched a permanant home for our LGBT Pride site, while it provides a really interesting timeline and a cool map of Pride events around the world, and while it's fantastic (fabulous?) that we're putting the engineering effort behind supporting the exceptionally important gay pride movement (marriage for all! Yay California)...

Yeah, the part I'm impressed by most is the banner. It's just mesmerizing.

And in continuing redesign news, My Yahoo! has also gotten a bit of a facelift, streamlining their navigation and emphasizing the concept of different pages by accentuating them with tabs. One of the things that struck me first is that there was a weird gap to the left of the first tab, and I couldn't figure out why. Turns out that we now have a bit more control over our Quicklinks section, too, and can remove it a bit more effectively from the page by relegating it to that corner. I wouldn't mind it so much if I could completely customize it, but getting it out of the way will work for now.

Every now and then, a few interesting things come out of Australia, like the Alpha _beta search engine and the first rollout of a new Yahoo! mail domain for Yahoo!7 users. And, you know, they export some cute pictures of koalas, too. They're at it again with their redesign of the Yahoo! Australia homepage, which definitely is flashier than the standard version (literally, the main module is done in Flash. You can disable it, don't worry) and features a few cool upgrades, like increased (or, at least, more visible) localization around weather, movies, food, and TV, and a few fun integrations with personalized services like Flickr, Answers, and Y! Video (when you mouse-over those logos). I personally prefer the standard version from an aesthetic standpoint, but the increased focus on Stuff About You is a welcome exploration.