Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

I've always loved the University Hack Day program, and you really can't get a better feel for the experience than by reading about Brandon "Qwazie" Kwaselow and his adventures at the Michigan HackU event. He hacked the entire night on his project, an iPhone application to explore points of interest from our WhereOnEarth database (and even an API layer on top of that to add your own), and was rewarded with fabulous prizes, a silly hat, and an eventual trip out here to the main campus to show off his hack to all of us Yahoos. The overall event got some nice press from the school newspaper and some of the Yahoo! employees who went out to help even got to experience the excitement of watching Michigan win their first round matchup in the NCAA tournament, which I totally called on my bracket, by the way. Congrats to Brandon for winning this University Hack Day and good luck to all the participants in future iterations!

Whenever we watch television in my house, we inevitably end up with a fleet of laptops parked on our sofas. Not that there isn't quality TV content out there, but the flow of information is torrential enough on the web that there always seems to be some snippet of data that we need to stay on top of, and there's plenty of downtime during the commercial breaks, or in our case, by the grace of DVR, the opportunities to abuse the fast-forward button.

If for no other reason than that my lap is getting really warm, it would be great to cut out the middleman. That seems to be the main thrust of our Yahoo! TV Widgets initiative, which brings the massive utility and convenience of Yahoo! Widgets directly to the medium-sized screen. For now, it requires a special TV to run, but more sets with Widget support are rolling out the door this summer. Check out the video below for a preview of what technical marvels might be rolling into your door if you try it out.

I've been doing my best to keep up to date with my location updates since installing the Friends on Fire Facebook application (which I mentioned last week), and have quickly learned that my friends do not care where I am located. But still, I'm bravely soldiering on, if for no other reason to prove to myself that I occasionally get out of the house. One utility that's made this process much easier was also released last week -- the Fire Eagle updater for Firefox. It's an official Firefox extension which gives you one-click automatic location updating, hooking into the Mozilla Geode project to extrapolate your position based on nearby WiFi signals. There are a couple steps to go through to get it installed, since you need Geode as well, but once it's set up, your surprisingly accurate updated location in Fire Eagle, and subsequently Friends on Fire, is just a button click away (no typing! Thanks, triangulation!). Your friends will be...well, still indifferent.

With so many beautiful photos posted to Flickr, you're bound to come across a couple that you want to share with your friends. This just got drastically easier thanks to some upgrades to the Contacts selector -- with a few keystrokes, you'll have almost automatic autocompletion results, instead of being stuck with the old "Loading..." screen. It's very slick and can also be enjoyed when composing Flickr mail or searching through your contacts.

Wow, what a night. I spent it watching a set of absolutely stellar NCAA basketball games on TV, with some sky-high overtime periods and with the star players out in force. Fans couldn't help but be over the moon as several upstart schools blazed into the second round, while some other giant names absolutely imploded. Refereeing may have occasionally been nebulous, but in the end, it was the talent of these young athletes that shone through. Millions of brackets were busted, although the odds of any of them remaining perfect were already astronomical. Like usual, March Madness is turning out to be heavenly.

On a related note, there's an awesome automated system out there, the "blind astrometry server", which ties into Flickr to automatically sort through any pictures of the night sky that you upload, identify what part of the sky you were looking at, and tag any interesting astronomical features. It's out of this world!

Hey, and 'Nova is still in the tournament, too!

We've always had pretty decent filters available for Yahoo! Image Search. You could pick different image sizes, only show black & white or color images...actually, that's all that I can remember, and I don't remember the interface being particularly compelling.

Well, that's taken care of now, and there are new goodies to go along with those smooth-looking  sliding effects. The most obvious change is that your search results will update inline as you change filters, which just makes the experience feel so much snappier. There are also a few new filters that are really handy -- you can choose to search for only Flickr or only non-Flickr photos, and you can explicitly specify the exact size of image you want returned, instead of needing to, for instance, sort through any vaguely "large" photos for that perfect background image to go with your 640x480 display. The filter settings are remembered from search to search, so you can tweak your query to get better results at your leisure.

Even nicer than the new filter additions is the expansion of the "Also searched for" module to more types of image queries, like flowers or cats. Neat! I just have no idea how to tell what will actually trigger that module, sadly.

Inquisitor has a lot of things going for it. It's all about making your searches easier and more personalized, and it does that by: anticipating your needs through search suggestions; reducing your keystrokes by providing autocompletions; and giving you easy access to past successful results by keeping track of your search history, so you can get to exactly what you're looking for with no wasted time. Actually, it sounds like it would make an awesome mobile application.

Go go gadget mobile application!

For you iPhone users, check it out at the app store! All the cool kids are doing it.

I can't help but mention Yahoo! Sports Tournament Pick'em here, just because I worked damn hard on it and it's a huge part of why the updates to this blog have been so spotty in past weeks. As it turns out, though, one of the nicest additions this season is barely my responsibility at all. The Yahoo! Mobile team took advantage of several internal APIs that we've developed to bring you an actual full-fledged mobile experience for March Madness on Yahoo!. It's not at the level of a native iPhone app, but it's a huge step in the right direction for the Sports team and it's still a great way for you to keep on top of your bracket with us from wherever you are. Check it out at http://m.yahoo.com/ncaa! Ideally on a phone, but I guess a laptop is basically shaped like a phone anyway.

(other cool features of our March Madness game: seed bonuses! Easy renewal from last year! An updated Flash Scenario Generator! Hooray. If you're interested in signing up, you'll want to do so before the first game on Thursday morning)

Usually this is where I'd insert a cheer for my alma mater, but we didn't make it this year. :(

We mentioned a little while back that My Yahoo! had added color customization to your My Yahoo! page, letting you generally express yourself in chunks of hue and saturation. But flat colors are worth, at best, two to three hundred words in equivalence (even though you can choose what color the words are), while we know that pictures will bring us to the full thousand. Ladies and gentlemen, start your novels.

The coolest thing about the ability to set custom pictures as the background of your My Yahoo! page, aside from the actual feature itself, is the integration with Flickr. I already have a moderate number of photos that I've uploaded to my Yahoo! ID-tied Flickr account, and I had immediate access to all of them as background options from the get-go.

It was horribly easy and I definitely want to express my gratitude to the My Yahoo! team. A Thank You background, coming right up!

You may have heard the news -- Fire Eagle released a cool Facebook application to help you keep your friends close, or at least know where they are in case you want to try. Even the name is awesome, Friends on Fire. It sounds almost Whopper Sacrifice-esque. The idea is simple -- you like your friends and want to know if they're going to be hanging around nearby, and Friends on Fire will let you do that. As long as you're broadcasting where you are, you also might have something interesting to comment, so Friends on Fire gives you the ability to send out short-lived Signals tied to locations. I personally imagine it as though you're leaving little thought bubbles floating in midair for your friends to stumble on if they happen to also walk by where you were. But maybe that's just me.

The most exciting thing about Friends on Fire to me is that it finally gives me a reason to personally start messing with Fire Eagle. I previously didn't have much incentive to just yell to the world that I happened to be chilling somewhere, but it feels much more accessible and almost reasonable if I have a clean interface to my existing lists of friends and a conveniently located application on a site that I already visit obsessively. Also, I like that it's an application actually developed by the Fire Eagle team, instead of just some random program on the internet with whom I'm sharing my latitude and longitude. Feels less sketchy that way.

The fact that you need to actively connect with your friends who are using Friends on Fire, instead of just being able to passively stalk them like with most features on Facebook, is a little bit annoying, but I think it's the right choice. Your and their privacy isn't something that should be treated lightly, and anyway, you should always be careful when playing with fire.