Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

What happens when you miss a friend?

Well, in the case of ex-Upcoming/Yahoo full time genius, Leonard Lin, you take a weekend, a slew of APIs and build fireball, a combination of FireEagle, Twitter, Upcoming, google mobile, and a mess of other applications. If anything, it kinda shows what one can do with this stuff.

My apologies to Sean about yesterday. I'm at Web 2.0 this week and... well... it's hard to blog when you're answering questions and doing the booth monkey dance.

Oh, speaking of monkeys...

Right, so today we announced SearchMonkey. What's SearchMonkey? Well, much like the other types you tend to find online (grease, code), it's a way for you to modify search results. There are two ways you can do this, you can augment the returned results (using a modified, and somewhat restricted version of PHP), or you can reformat the individual result using XSL. You also specify which search result you want modified (e.g. everything from 'ycoolthing.com' gets a gold star because we're special).

Oh, it's not just about you though, you can share your greasemonkey scripts and layouts, or choose to run someone else's (like that script that adds reviews from Top Gear to auto search results). By now, the true web geek realizes that what we're doing here is actually using a bit of that Semantic Web stuff that all the kids are talking about, but there's much more going on here. This is the first of many peeks into the New Yahoo! thing. We're opening up.

And that's always cool.

Right now, we're opening things up to a limited beta audience while we let folks kick the tires. If you're interested, please be sure to sign up.

Yahoo! Local works on a pretty basic premise -- you want to find stuff that's close to something else. This is pretty easy to understand, but when you actually start retrieving results, the concept gets lost along the way. You see a bunch of little flags clustered together, but there's very rarely a good sense of exactly which parts of the map are warranting consideration.

Their new Search Circle takes away all the guesswork in one interactive, intuitive, and frankly awesome fell swoop. When you expand the floating map next to the your search results, it'll place a circle around the effective search area for your query, letting you know the farthest reaches of your possible results. Not getting enough results? Grab the handle and expand the search radius. Want something a little closer to home? Shrink it back down. Heck, if you know that the street a few blocks over always has some good restaurants, just drag the entire circle down that way.

Seeing this, it almost seems unbearable to specify localized searches any other way, which certainly suggests a job well done.

The express purpose of Flickr has always been photo sharing, so it's amazing that it took them this long to finally put up a button to let you do just that.

It makes a lot of other common sharing functions a lot easier, too -- the Contacts box autocompletes, for instance, and the Embed option automatically adds in all of the appropriate image attribution. As a photo owner, you also have all the standard options about disabling embedding and so on. For me, it's somewhat broken for videos, but I assume that'll be fixed soon (EDIT: oh yeah, it's totally fixed).

What is BrowserPlus?

Skylar Woodward spilled the beans a bit about it, but it's ok, he kinda wrote it. Naturally, since not much has been discussed about it, there's a lot of confusion. For one thing, it's not Yahoo! Gears. In all honesty, it could work rather nicely with Gears, since they both solve different problems. With Gears, it's "How do I make my pages work when the interweb isn't?" With BrowserPlus, it's "How do I extend things in and out of the browser?" In some respects, it's a plug in that makes it easier for you to interact with your desktop and browser as one app, but not tied to Windows or IE or being wrought of pure evil.

It's actually far harder to explain than it is to show in action. I've added it to my Mash Profile so you can see. (sorry, folks on linux aren't able to play quite yet.) You can see it with the Photodropper tool. It's pretty cool to play with, even with a few quirks i saw.

The Flickr community is amazingly vocal, which is a testament to the passion that users have for the site. Every now and then -- super rarely, really -- they'll complain. But there are clearly so many valid problems that need to be addressed! For instance, just the other week, Jake Rome noticed that, while Flickr offers plenty of photo hosting solutions, they DO NOT offer FREE DONUTS.

*gasp*

But the nice thing is that, within reason, Flickr listens to its community, hence the birth of The Day of the Donut, where Flickr gave out free donuts, and indeed, donuts propagated across the world.

It was on Wednesday, but I had a donut today so I feel like I contributed.

It was a pretty solid Flickr week. Kudos to them!

No doubt about it. Flickr loves you. Particularly if you're a developer after the launch of code.flickr.com, your "one stop shop for information, gossip and discussion with the Flickr developer community".

Honestly, it's pretty cool what they've set up, and there's a lot of good examples I ought to steal borrow, like the bug tracker (so you can find out when they fixed that glitch), and the public subversion directory so you can feed the need to learn how the uploadr works, as well as potentially contribute back to the collective. (That'd be a killer idea for the gallery, really. Well, once we've got someone other than just me doing moderation.)

Once again, Flickr forges ahead. (and I'm DAMN happy they're on our side.)

Everyone seems to be using Facebook these days (I mean, including me. It's totally rad), but we all know that you're saving your best stuff for some of the awesome Yahoo! social networks, like Flickr and del.icio.us. But if you want to share those pretty photos or cool links with your Facebook friends (to enlighten them as to how much better the scene is over here, obviously), how does that work?

Ah, right. That's how. Facebook now lets you pull in updates from a variety of sources, including Flickr and del.icio.us, to display directly in your mini feed (and presumably your friends' news feeds). I don't even know if we had to do any work for this or if they're just using public APIs, but, word, thanks Facebook!

What's happening in your town? Ok, if you live somewhere like Washington DC or New York, that's probably reasonably easy to figure out, but what about Piscataway, Dubuque, and Sheboygan? Heck, you probably have no idea what's going on in Düsseldorf, Shepparton-Mooroopna and Hammerfest.

Well, now you no longer have that excuse.

From the fine folks in Yahoo! India, a previous Hack Day winner that's turning out to be a serious winner (and darn addictive at that), even if they mark Ballaghadereen as "Castlerea". Those are fighting words.

Unpronounceable fighting words, but fighting words none the less.

I'm a compulsive Photoshopper, so whenever I end up planning parties or events, I inevitably waste a couple hours trying to craft a descriptive image to associate with my invitation. Ideally some sort of groan-inducing visual pun, but I can't always get that lucky.

Now, Upcoming has long since provided the ability to upload said images to their event pages, which also highlighted a pretty sweet integration with Flickr. They've augmented this offering in two really important ways. First, as the organizer of an event, you can set one of your event images as an official flyer, placing it prominently above the inset map for all your happy event-goers to enjoy. Now everyone will be forced to appreciate my handiwork when they accept the invitation! My friends are annoyed that you're encouraging me, Upcoming.

The more subtle improvement is that Upcoming is now willing to let you upload photos directly to the event, instead of going through Flickr. Nothing against Flickr, of course, but associating Flickr photos is not as instantaneous or flexible as just tossing the photo up there. Maybe they're still using Flickr as the backend, and you certainly can still go the Flickr route if you prefer (when you click onto the photo gallery, Flickr photos are still attributed and differentiated from photos uploaded by Upcoming users). But as a user, it's awesome that I don't have to worry about having an account or exposing my Flickr friends to what a huge dork I am by means of the painful logo that I concoct. Not that they don't already have their suspicions.