Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Sometimes, you just want to listen to some music. You don't want 30-second tracks, you don't want the hassle of trying to download it, you don't want to have to deal with DRM or other vastly consumer-unfriendly inventions from the RIAA. You might not even want to listen to it again after the first time, but some guy mentioned it and you'd like to see what all the fuss is about.

Sometimes, a tool just does everything right, and this time, it happens to be ours. Check out this Yahoo! Music music blog, about a cool new song from a newly solo musician. The linked song can be played right there in the page, using the always impressive Yahoo! Media Player, but it's actually a full track instead of a truncated sample. You can listen to up to 25 full songs (over some undisclosed period of time -- EDIT: apparently a month), which is perfect because you really ought to buy something after that many plays anyway. I haven't switched to Rhapsody yet (still waiting on our official switch-over from Y!MU), but whenever I do, I'll be able to listen to this song as much as I want, and, hey, I'm encouraged to do so because I finally have a chance to judge in full how much I like it. It's lightweight, hassle-free, and works exactly as I would want it to --  that's music to my ears.

Right, so you've got a wordpress blog, and it's the cat's pajamas. Ok, granted, if you're wrapping a cat up at night in PHP code you really need to get out more, but understandably, you're probably pretty excited about it.

Well, mostly excited.

You're probably looking at it and thinking "Gosh, I wish that this here nifty blog used a light weight CSS layout mechanism that allowed for easy, standardized presentations." (Yeah, between that cat thing and spouting stuff like that, you REALLY need to get out more.) Well, thanks to the diligent efforts of the best coiffured engineer in YDN, you now have the ability to use YUI Grids in your Wordpress blog.

It's been a while since I've played with Kickstart -- honestly, it's just because I haven't been looking for a job and therefore haven't needed to leverage my connections! And I'm also not looking for a job now! Man, it's hard to talk about recruiting social networks without digging yourself into a hole.

One of the greatest assets of Kickstart, as it was first described to me, was the way that it was intended to help you navigate your network to figure out the best people to connect to if you were looking for a job or looking for more information about a company. Kickstart hasn't quite taken off yet, but they have added in that concept of trying to figure out the best people to talk to based on your affiliations. Whenever you see a profile, you'll also see a little meter next to the user's picture indicating how similar you are, tying in which schools you've gone to, where you've worked, if you're friends, etc. Whenver you conduct a search for a company, school, or affiliation, you'll be presented with a ranked list of Kickstarters, indicating how likely those people would be to kickstart you into that company/school/affiliation, letting you know who you ought to befriend right away. You're also presented on the homepage with people with whome you might want to connect, based on how much you have in common. It's still pretty rudimentary, but it's getting towards that vision of what Kickstart can really help you achieve, which I've always been absolutely in love with.

It's always cool when I mention a feature in passing and it garners a mention on an official blog a few days later. Of course, the integration of Alpha _beta on top of the Australian news site has absolutely nothing to do with my post, but it's still nice to feel prescient once in a while. Mostly, Alpha _beta is augmenting the Australian news search results with photos (both from Image Search and from Flickr) and actual web results, so it's nothing hugely different from the regular application, but it certainly does make the results look prettier and feel a bit more comprehensive.

This will seen exceptionally shallow of me, but while it's awesome that we've launched a permanant home for our LGBT Pride site, while it provides a really interesting timeline and a cool map of Pride events around the world, and while it's fantastic (fabulous?) that we're putting the engineering effort behind supporting the exceptionally important gay pride movement (marriage for all! Yay California)...

Yeah, the part I'm impressed by most is the banner. It's just mesmerizing.

And in continuing redesign news, My Yahoo! has also gotten a bit of a facelift, streamlining their navigation and emphasizing the concept of different pages by accentuating them with tabs. One of the things that struck me first is that there was a weird gap to the left of the first tab, and I couldn't figure out why. Turns out that we now have a bit more control over our Quicklinks section, too, and can remove it a bit more effectively from the page by relegating it to that corner. I wouldn't mind it so much if I could completely customize it, but getting it out of the way will work for now.

Every now and then, a few interesting things come out of Australia, like the Alpha _beta search engine and the first rollout of a new Yahoo! mail domain for Yahoo!7 users. And, you know, they export some cute pictures of koalas, too. They're at it again with their redesign of the Yahoo! Australia homepage, which definitely is flashier than the standard version (literally, the main module is done in Flash. You can disable it, don't worry) and features a few cool upgrades, like increased (or, at least, more visible) localization around weather, movies, food, and TV, and a few fun integrations with personalized services like Flickr, Answers, and Y! Video (when you mouse-over those logos). I personally prefer the standard version from an aesthetic standpoint, but the increased focus on Stuff About You is a welcome exploration.

I've got to admit, I'm not a heavy MyBlogLog user, but they certainly do put together some pretty neat stuff. Their most recent adventure is Connector, which maps out all of the other sites that your MyBlogLog contacts are using, so that you can join up with them over there, too. After all, if you're really friends with someone, you might want to see their photos (on Flickr) or read the same cool sites as them (via del.icio.us and Digg) or be privy to every single action they take throughout the day (thanks, Twitter). Presumably your contacts would have had to first add their affiliation with these services through the MyBlogLog Services profile stuff -- I don't think we're in the business of correlating against scraped user databases just yet.

In closing, MyBlogLog Blog is an amazing name. It evokes fond memories of Bob Loblaw's Law Blog and I miss Arrested Development all over again.

Whenever I'm scanning through movie reviews, I usually find that it helps to read through the outliers. If one critic tears a movie a new one, what was his main beef? Were there any positives grudgingly admitted? And how does that compare to this other review that waxes poetic about the movie's instant classic status? Are any of the perceived flaws from the first review explained away? It's a nice way to end up with a fairly unbiased picture of what you might actually get out of your hard-earned $10.

The Summer Movie Guide presents the same idea on its review pages (for example, Get Smart) by calling out some of the best reviews both from people who hated and people who loved a movie. It takes it one step beyond just plucking out the Highest and Lowest grades that it can find by apparently mashing those concepts together with the Most Helpful reviews to make sure that your contrasting viewpoints are worthwhile. It's still up to you to decide which thumb direction is right for you, but at least you have easy access to a good variety of opinion.

EDIT: Except, of course, now I can't find a link to the cool reviews page from the actual movie page within the Summer Movie Guide. :P It's very possible that these are manually generated one-off pages for all of the big name movies so that we can link to a review page from the Yahoo! home page, which makes them slightly less cool. But, still, it's a neat idea.

Other examples: The Incredible Hulk, Kung Fu Panda, Sex and the City. You can pretty reliably come up with the URL based on the movie title; I just can't figure out why this wouldn't be linked to from every page if it's actually programmatically generated.

So, now that you've got that fancy @ymail address, what are you going to do with it? One suggestion -- refamiliarize yourself with Y! Open Shortcuts. Notably:

Right there from your Firefox chrome (or any other Y! Search box), you can start composing an email to me, which I know is the one thing that you really wanted to do this weekend. Just in general, learn to love Open Shortcuts. Earlier this week, I realized that I was getting to our package documentation pages by typing out a well-formed URL that could totally be parametrized, leading to:

!set pkg http://ourpackagesystem.yahoo.com/by-package/%s/

Meaning I can get to where I want to go just by typing !pkg sports_webserver_thingy in my browser search box or on any other Yahoo! site, on any computer that I use. It's very powerful and probably woefully underutilized, so go on and fix that!

I might take Fridays to reiterate Y! Cool Things that I think are still cool and that haven't gotten love for a little while. But maybe that's me-being-late-for-a-concert talking.