Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

For a long while, Yahoo! Buzz had been limited to only covering a select group of authorized publishers. This allowed the team to keep pretty tight control over the quality and reliability of the sites hosting any interesting stories that we cared to link to, but it also meant that there were vast swaths of the web that simply would never get any attention from our service, cutting them off from a significant potential stream of users and keeping us from some really awesome content.

Well, be careful what you wish for, previously unbuzzable web sites-- the Yahoo! fire hose™ is now ready and waiting to crush your servers under a massive wave of traffic. As of today, any web page can be submitted to Yahoo! Buzz via our handy submission page. There's also a sizable collection of neat buttons to get you started, so that even your least web-savvy users can click you towards the coveted top module on yahoo.com. So, if you've ever felt like your servers are not quite enough on fire, start generating some Buzz today!

I'm used to being wowed by all of our enhanced results in Yahoo! Search, as they add a lot of visual flair to an otherwise utilitarian search results page (though adding SearchMonkey applications can help!). But when the results are already flashy, what can you do to wow the users? Maybe just make the results better, like we've done with our Olympics image search. As long as we know that you're searching for an athlete, or trying to find information about the Olympics, we'll now show a fun carousel of high-resolution images from Yahoo! Sports. It's the first time that I've seen this type of in-house search enhancement for images, so it's kind of a neat evolution.

Or the Japanese, or the Italian, I suppose. Inquisitor has launched its first update post-acquisition, whose chief new feature is internationalization into eight different languages -- internationalization and integration with Yahoo! BOSS, BOSS integration and...its two new features are BOSS integration and internationalization, and a nice graphical facelift...its THREE new features are internationalization, and BOSS integration, a graphical facelift, and an almost entirely redesigned landing page...its FOUR...no...amongst its new features...amongst its new feature set are such elements as internationalization, BOSS integration, ...I'll post again.

I'll admit, the title is my favorite part of this post.

Fire Eagle has finally spread its wings, offering a straightforward way to track your location and expose it to the world. There's not much to the site itself -- ooh, you can say where you are and...er, continue to be there -- but it seems like the ease of integration by other applications with the Fire Eagle service is what makes this a pretty big thing. There's already a sizeable number of applications in the gallery that desperately want to know where you are. So now that I've told Fire Eagle where I am, I just need to find the application that sends cookies to my location. *hunts*

The Yahoo! Media Player started out as a cool little feature of our Yahoo! Music site , and now is a hugely useful, easily consumable, and super awesome tool available for the entire web to enjoy. Well, it looks like we've got all of this music data on the Yahoo! Music site, so why not send it down the same road? The Yahoo! Music API is a great step in that direction, letting you search for artists, find information about artists and albums, pull down embeddable videos, and more. The Yahoo! Developer Network covers a few examples of how you could put it to use and also provides a quick comparison to the Last.fm web services.

Having spent the last three hours watching the incredible Olympics opening ceremony, I can't help but plug a few more Olympics related products. While I don't have a phone that can enjoy it, the Mobile Olympics site is still fun to look at in a browser. Presumably your iPhone will prove to be a better venue. If you're like me and aren't willing to spend $70+ on a data plan, you can still get in on the fun through My Yahoo! -- the module they put together is really impressive. Not as impressive as a mass of Chinese volunteers operating an undulating grid of blocks, but pretty good nonetheless.

MyBlogLog has done a lot of awesome things with fostering blog communities, but the most visible feature, tracking the users who have visited a page, has always puzzled me a bit. Do I, as a blog reader, really want to carry around all of these identifying cookies just so I can get my icon added to the list of recent viewers? It's interesting for other readers and the blog owner, certainly, but maybe I'm not that selfless about giving to the community.

The new Just For You widget speaks to my more selfish motivations. Now I have a reason to broadcast to the blogosphere who I am -- they can use that information to help find other stories on that site that I might be interested in (based on my stated interests through MyBlogLog) and explicitly call those to my attention in a pretty little module. It's a tiny bit invasive, I suppose, but it's also useful, which offsets a lot of those sticky privacy issues. As long as you're going around and being a good netizen, you might as well get something out of it.

Contrary to what Monty Python would have you believe, you can definitely have too much spam. Every time that I have to scan through the pages of poorly titled, grammatically inconsistent email messages that end up in my spam folder -- or, worse yet, my inbox -- I start to think that maybe the vikings wouldn't be all that bad as an alternative. As the most heavily used web email service out there, Yahoo! Mail consequently attracts the most spam, too, and has legions of spam-fighting robots (or computer scientists, maybe) doing their best to keep you and spam as far apart as possible. Still, you might be curious how you can actively help to make sure your inbox stays clean, so it's great that the Mail guys have gone ahead and hosted an open workshop with our Anti-Spam Czar to get all your spammy questions answered. There's a lot of good advice about what is or isn't helpful in avoiding spam -- use the Mark as Spam button! -- and it's an interesting read about why our anti-spam technology works the way it does and where we're going from here. Certainly not out for a breakfast of spam, egg, sausage and spam, if we can help it.

The Olympics are nearly upon us, a fact that is not lost on my coworkers, who'll be working through the night monitoring the Yahoo! Sports Summer Olympics site, verifying results, and generally kicking butt. Good luck, guys! The site features a fresh new look, detailed results for all the athletes, sports, and countries that you can think of, a rockin' new trivia game, and a customizable Watchlist that you can use to keep an eye on the particular subjects that interest you. There are tons of nice little touches, too -- autocomplete search broken out by category, quicklink mouseovers for Watchlist stories, a deluge of interesting blog posts, et cetera. If you're interested in the Olympics, Yahoo! Sports is the place to be.

Coincidentally, getting there is even easier thanks to some excellent Yahoo! Search integration. The presentation of medals on the results page is just about as inspiring as the presentation of medals in real life, and the overview results have the nice touch of popping the featured video into a lightbox. To round out the offering, there will be search shortcuts for players and sports rolled out over the next few days. Maybe it used to be a marathon to find quality Olympics coverage -- we've turned it down to table tennis for you. Enjoy!

Common knowledge states that we only yodel over here, but our talents aren't limited to our voices. Check out this cute and (for me) heartwarming video over at Yodel Anecdotal, produced with Matt Harding of wherethehellismatt.com fame. Despite the endless excitement that's been the past year, Yahoos can still break it down on the dance floor.