Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 (for Windows) has come out of Beta, and along with all of the standard polish is the entirely unexpected inclusion of an embeddable one-to-one chat widget, christened Pingbox™.

The Pingbox Studio is dead simple to play with, letting you manage up to 10 distinct Pingboxes™ that you can stick just about anywhere. There's sadly a limit of 100 concurrent users per Pingbox™, but it still provides an easy way for an owner of a small site to foster some direct communication with users (without exposing any Yahoo! contact information!). There's also pretty tight integration with the new Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 -- you're given new groups to manage all of the visitors to your Pingboxes™, and you can enable or disable the widgets directly from your messenger list. The Help page covers most everything else, or, hey, just ask above. It would be kind of nice if users could leave messages or if there was a way to force visitors to engage the widget before it activated (so that you wouldn't max out the 100 visitor cap solely on passive users drifting by), but I'm sure it'll evolve as more people get to play with it.

When Firefox introduced the ability to reorder tabs, that basically completed tabbed browsing for me. Being able to quickly context-switch between a bunch of persistently displayed pages was already a killer feature, but there would still be those frustrating times that I'd need to flip back and forth between two tabs that happened to be located on opposite ends of my browser window. Having control over how my tabs were organized not only reduced my risk of carpal tunnel but also gave me a more fulfilling sense of ownership over my work space.

Given that My Yahoo! is all about ownership of your space, it's fantastic that they've finally introduced the ability to reorder the tabs for all of your pages, too! If you've separated all of your personal modules into a bunch of separate pages to keep 'em organized, then you should definitely check it out.

You've no doubt already seen the blog blitz on the topic, but, still...the new Yahoo! Search+FoxyPlayer integration is pretty awesome, so have another blog post. I've been high on the Yahoo! Media Player, now known as the FoxyPlayer, for ages, because it's dead simple to integrate into a page and it makes listening to music in your browser so much easier. Heck, people don't even have to drop it into a page -- if you're using the FoxyTunes extension, we'll do it for you. And now, we've got you covered when you search on Yahoo!, too, by launching the FoxyPlayer and letting you listen to up to 25 free full length songs per month without needing to do a thing except press PLAY. I mean, you'll get 30 second samples after you run out, which is cool already, but 25 free full length songs just for searching? That's rockin', like the Foo Fighters. Be sure to check it out -- at the bottom of the page, in case you're not very observant -- and congratulations to the Search and Music teams for a killer feature.

More blog love:

• Yahoo! Search Blog
• Yodel Anecdotal
• TechCrunch
• Even Valleywag, and they kind of hate us.

On one more BOSS/Open Hack Day related note -- Sau Sheong Chang, our Engineering Director for South-East Asia, spent Open Hack Day playing around with the BOSS image search, and came up with a seriously cool photo mosaic program that'll generate a photo mosaic based on themed images found on the web. So, if you've ever wanted to demonstrate your love of Building D in the key of Yahoo!, there's some source code on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog that you'll probably be interested in.

I'll admit that there's a lot that I don't quite get about our Start Wearing Purple campaign, but I can at least appreciate location-aware photobikes. These babies made their premiere at the Open Hack Day, wheeling around the campus and soaking up some rays through their solar cells. They've now been dispersed around the world to explore bold new frontiers, provided that there's a bike trail or some sort of ramp. Through the magic of GPS receivers and Flickr geolocation, you can also track each bike's progress from within the Purple Pedals section of the marketing site. It's a fun idea as relates to moblogging, I just wish there were a better way to consume it.

NOTE: All of the uploaded photos have a ybike tag (thanks, devel-random), and you can actually pass the geoRSS feed through Pipes for a nice little map, even though it only has the last 20 images. And here's a slightly nicer version of just Amit's Bike's photos, though I'm having a few issues making that pipe truly configurable.

Even after an awesome weekend of mashup hacks and mashup music, we're apparently still in the mood. One of the great aspirations of BOSS was to enable smaller developers to really experiment with new, exciting approaches to search without needing the investment and infrastructure to develop an index as comprehensive as the one we've already put together, and we're putting our money where our mouth is with the BOSS Mashable Challenge. Presented in conjunction with Mashable, this contest will hopefully provide some of those crazy hackers out there the impetus to really sit down with our search data and create something original. It only takes, like, four hours, guys.

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.