Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

There's definitely a large community of users still using Yahoo! Mail Classic instead of the All-New Yahoo! Mail (including one of my housemates) -- if you prefer the simpler and slightly quicker interface or if you just hate progress, then it can make a lot of sense (in fact, you can see the comparison here). And the Yahoo! Mail team certainly hasn't forgotten about you, continuing to roll out cool new features like integrated instant messaging and texting.

All in all, it's very much more like the chat in Gmail than the existing chat interface in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Instead of your chat windows opening in new tabs (which Mail Classic doesn't have), they'll pop into a floating window on the page that you can move around to wherever you like. All of your open IM sessions will live in that window, which does mean that it can get a bit crowded, but at least the mouseover still gives you your friend's user name when the messenger tabs get too narrow (EDIT: You can also resize the chat window by dragging the lower right corner). You can minimize it to avoid taking up too much space, and get a brightly-colored alert for every incoming message (but sadly nothing outside of the browser window, meaning you'll need to manually check periodically for new messages if you're tabbing in your browser EDIT: the page header now rotates new messages as they arrive, meaning you'll get a notification as long as you can see the page header, yay!). And the chat window persists even as you navigate around the Mail application, a fun behavior that I'm seeing more and more of these days.

If you don't like it, you're able to leave yourself always signed out and not even have to deal with it, and if you do, it gives you another really great way to tie into the gigantic Yahoo! IM network without having to open anything more than your mailbox.

Note: it's currently rolling out across all the mail farms, so you might not get it right away. I did for one account, did not for the other.

It's been almost a year since the addition of video to Flickr -- so-called "long photos" to capture those snippets of your life where a still shot doesn't quite suffice. I've always loved how seamlessly they've been integrated into the site, coexisting peacefully alongside photos with minimal decoration and a seriously understated UI. They've garnered more tools support in the newer versions of the Flickr Uploadr and Flickr is continuing to roll out interesting new video-related features, like the upcoming Flickr Clock, which I know little to nothing about but with which you can start participating through the Flickr Clock group.

It was actually when I was playing around with the Flickr Clock group that I noticed another cute little feature of Flickr Video -- the "long photos" have "long thumbnails". Clicking on the video icon in the lower left corner of a video thumbnail will queue up a tiny, tiny video player to let you sample the video in-line on the page. It really enhances the feeling that, behind every photo, there might be a little story just waiting to come to life.

When I need to get some hardcore currency converting on, the Yahoo! Currency Converter is there for me, making swift Javascripty work of my most arcane monetary queries (quick! How many Zimbabwean dollars are in a Pakistani Rupee? Oh, 500,895.33, thanks). For a guy blessed with full use of my five senses, this experience is filled with nifty effects like popup calendars, flyout menus, and autocompletions based on country or currency type, and it's all very fun to use.

But life's a lot tougher when you're, for instance, visually impaired, and the Yahoo! Finance engineers responsible for the Currency Converter went way out of their way to make sure that their tool was super accessible. You can read about how they integrated some really impressive degradation of service into the interaction over at the Yahoo! Developer blog.

As part of a fairly graceful redesign of Yahoo! News, the team introduced a feature on their article pages to allow you to expand and collapse the text of the article, with the default view being collapsed. This was handy in case you just wanted to browse the article and then move right along to the gobs of related content at the bottom of the page, which you might never get to if you had to slog through a mile of verbiage. If you wanted more, it was very easy to just click the "Read Full Article" button.

For me, however, it more often than not felt unnecessarily burdensome to continually need to click a button to read an article that I had never had any intention of skipping over. Personal choice and all -- I just happen to like reading. For a while, I was just stuck with the feature, but then this little link appeared by the "Collapse Article" button:

Which essentially permanently* disabled the buttons, giving me all the news, all the time. It's a cool little feature altogether, but it's even cooler that I have the option not to like it.

* I couldn't figure out how to undo it, at least. Can't tell if it's tied to a cookie or stored server-side, but clearing my cookies was rather inconclusive.

A man should never have to ask for directions. But...if he really has to, it might as well be really simple. Simple we can handle.

Yahoo! Local understands that, hence the nifty in-line prompt asking for your starting location when you click on the "Get Directions" link on any Local result page, which will then lead directly to a map with the route already figured out. It's a significant step up from the previous behavior, which, if I remember correctly, would dump you off on a map of the destination with no context whatsoever, leaving you to sort things out on your own. Sure, a man ought to be able to find his way around a map, but this makes it a whole lot easier. Being manly and being lazy pretty much go hand in hand, anyway.

Barack Obama was sworn in as the President of the United States of America this morning, compelling me to actually wake up at 7:30am so that I could raptly watch the live coverage. In case you somehow managed to miss it, or if you just want to relive this historic and awe-inspiring moment over and over, you can check out the cool interactive inauguration feature on Yahoo! News, featuring full video of President Obama's swearing-in and speech, as well as some form of media from literally every other inauguration in our nation's history.

• Sean Montgomery now has the option to share updates across the Yahoo! Profiles network from more than 20 external sites, including such Web 2.0 mainstays as YouTube, Twitter, and Yelp. Read more about it here!
• Sean Montgomery updated his blog to tell you about it.

I recently read an article where a helpful financial pundit suggested that one of the best ways for Yahoo! to turn the corner under our new CEO would be to purchase Twitter. As one of those neanderthals who hasn't yet acclimated to broadcasting my status to the world every five minutes, I didn't quite understand the appeal, until I caught Vik Singh's ridiculously cool BOSS/Twitter mashup, TweetNews. As he explains in his blog, there's often a disconnect between what news is actually the most recent, and what news is actually the most recent that's also interesting -- if you're searching for news about Apple, for instance, the most recent article about music sales dropping 7% worldwide is mildly relevant, but you really care about the fact that Steve Jobs recently committed to a six-month leave of absence (comparing a Yahoo! News search sorted by date vs. the top result from TweetNews). Leveraging the immediacy of Twitter on top of relevant search results is a fantastic way to filter down to the news that really matters right now, or at least is really trendy to put up as a status message.

(TechCrunch thinks that it's cool, too, which is why it kept dying under heavy traffic)

After watching the formal introduction of our new CEO, Carol Bartz, I'm optimistic that this'll be a very cool thing for Yahoo!. A very warm welcome to her, and let's not waste any time getting out there and drop-kicking the competition. :D In case you've forgotten, Tech Ticker is still super neat and has some excellent coverage of the market reaction, plus a really interesting personal entry from Sarah Lacey about her experience with the new boss.

Are you by any chance reading this blog entry through My Yahoo!, via the wonders of RSS? And has it ever bothered you that, while you're staring at your My Yahoo! page, I might post a blog entry right beneath your nose and you may not notice it until you explicitly refresh the page and/or module? If so...well, you seem easily bothered, frankly, but there's a solution nonetheless. As so handily pointed out on the My Yahoo! blog, you have the option to have your My Yahoo! page automatically refresh all of your modules at 15, 30, or 60 minute intervals, meaning that you can leave your page open with alacrity and be assured that it'll be mostly updated the next time you come back. I'm trying it out with this post right now, in fact. And a good day to you, me in 15 minutes!