Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

When you're looking for the origins of fantasy sports, it seems to always trace back to paper. Instead of vast corporations bending hundreds of servers and thousands of lines of code to your will, you'd wake up in the morning, grab the Sports section, and go to work. Box scores, pencil scratches, and napkin arithmetic were the name of the game, and despite the ink stains on your fingers and the dead trees in your wastebasket, the national obsession flourished. Yahoo! Fantasy Sports (available here) grew out of a desire to smooth out the tedious parts and bring a math-heavy game for stats nerds to millions of people who just want to cheer on their favorite player, but even we get nostalgic for paper sometimes. Our newly published Fantasy Baseball '09 Draft Guide, the first magazine ever produced by Yahoo! Sports, is hitting bookshelves in March, and it's chock full of every single prediction, stat, and insight we could wring out of our horribly overworked fantasy experts in the face of a ridiculously aggressive magazine-production timeline. Use it to dominate your friends on draft day. Use it for casual bathroom reading material. Use it as fuel for a trash can fire if you forget to pay your heating bill. Because sometimes, there's just no replacement for paper.

(take that, Amazon Kindle!)

Ahem...*shakes off the cobwebs*. Sorry for the hiatus, folks. Things have been a bit busy at work.

You know who else is also busy at work? The Flickr team. Every time you take a look around, they've got some cool new feature nestled into their site. In fact, this one even explicitly deals with "looking around", in the sense that, if you find an interesting photo, you might be curious about what other picturesque moments have taken place nearby. The Flickr API had introduced this concept with its ability to process queries by distance, but Nearby takes it one step further by actually turning it into a usable, and awesome, tool. (executive summary available here)

One of the things I like most about Nearby is all of the knobs that it exposes. You can capture really interesting slices by opening up the filters and narrowing in on things like chronologically ordered photos taken near Stanford Stadium on September 16, 2006 (the first game in the new stadium vs. Navy) or the most interesting photos of President Obama's Inauguration. Or you can expand out a bit and see the all-time most interesting photos taken near the Eiffel Tower (except, this time, in Vegas) -- apparently the Bellagio has a pretty glass ceiling. The Flickr Dev blog link above also demonstrates a few cool latitude/longitude tricks, which theoretically makes it a bit easier to pull up Nearby information than finding a geotagged photo and appending /nearby to the URL, though you probably need a pretty good GPS system.

Altogether, Nearby is just one more awesome way to do the thing...well, nearest and dearest to Flickr's heart: explore spectacular photos.

After the rollout of the new and improved Delicious, users started noticing a "feature" that left a bad taste in their mouths -- a previous infinite login period had been trimmed down to two weeks...which is significantly less than infinite. In general, this isn't a terrible idea, as having a scope on how long you can stay logged in means there's less risk if you forget to sign out at a public terminal. However, for a service like Delicious, where you want as little hassle as possible and much of the interaction can be done through extensions instead of actual site visitation (and where the users are more savvy about the Internet anyway), it's a total downer to be constantly interrogated about your password when you just want to save a little link.

Some people complained, even.

The happy ending? After a significant amount of internal discussion and assuredly difficult consideration about security and user interaction and so on, Delicious will now, once more, let you stay signed in. They even added a little popup warning message!

To the Delicious team (yum), great job with the fast turnaround and for making, in my opinion, the right decision! It's easy to tell that you really care about your users and the experience they have with the site.  To everyone else, keep on with the keeping (logged) on!

Even though I haven't had a chance to play with it yet (just like you! :D), I'm pretty excited about our eventual release of Search Pad. Now, I don't really use search as part of my daily routine, as I'm usually hitting sites I have bookmarked or exploring new content based on passive linking instead of active discovery. When I encounter a problem that needs solving through web search, however, I've definitely felt the pain of tabbing open dozens of windows and trying to keep track of the results. Search Pad seems like a great way to organize that process, keeping notes on resources that are of interest and holding onto those answers for later, and it's even cooler that I don't even have to think too much about it, with Search Pad guessing at my intent and helping out. The ability to paste in snippets of text related to a particular Pad and have it find the appropriate link to save for later also seems really handy -- even if you don't use Yahoo! Search as your primary search engine, you can still keep track of interesting queries in Search Pad. We'll see how it pans out when it's finally released, but watching the demo video has at least gotten me looking forward to that day.

The next time I lose my remote control, I'll have to consider using Flickr to find it. I mean, hey, it worked for these guys.

Photo by egoody, on Flickr