Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Well, since i missed yesterday and I'm equally swamped today, let me post up a two-fer for today:

1) If you haven't sniffed out Glue yet, feel free to go right ahead. This is a project out of the much under-appreciated Bangalore office to show you a lot more context to your searches. Think One Search for the desktop. On steroids. Possibly after mainlining espressos for most of the year.

2) Speaking of making the rest of the company look bad, MyBlogLog released their take on our new social initiative with Friender which helps you identify folks who are not yet contacts of yours. It's pretty damn clever, particularly since it updates dynamically based on the choices you make.

We have safe search for images to keep us from seeing those things that we don't want to see when we're surfing the visual web, but there's plenty of other things to avoid online -- malware, viruses, spammers, and bears (the number one threat to America!), oh my. Yahoo! Search is giving you a way to skip out on that, too, by partnering with McAfee to bring you SearchScan, an option for web searching that'll flag suspicious sites so that you don't unwittingly click into 'em. You can see a pretty good example of how this can help out by trying to download a couple of free screensavers, which as everyone knows, are always completely innocuous.

Chances are, you probably know the way to San Jose. Well, provided you know which of them you wanted since there are only about 20 or so worldwide. Still if you're looking for somewhere like "Wine Country" that could have been a tad difficult.

Now, the fine folks at Yahoo! Geo have opened up their database allowing you to get a unique identifier for every spec and spot of this planet, well, most of them at least. There are also plans afoot to allow you to help add locations to the hay-UGE database they have of such spots.

This is wicked cool because it means that if you're looking for "Allemagne", you can see that they really meant Germany, or conversely, if you're wondering what those fine folks in Milan call Germany, you can get that too, and be assured that you're all talking about the same place.

Definitely cool.

There are a few ways one can put something on a page. You can put an <img> tag on the page, which is fine for, well, images, but putting something more involved is never quite so easy.

Sorry, let me fix that. Never was easy.

Turns out that some folks agreed that getting the proper code and specifications for doing an embed was often more work than really necessary. According to news on http://developer.yahoo.net, they've rolled out a simple callback routine to fetch out the content that you can use to do an embed easily.

It's all in work right now, but to be honest, I'd expect the libraries to allow easy integration to come out very shortly. Rock, on.

Watching the hack presentations from the Media group today, I noticed one of the presenters demoing off of a video search results page that I had never seen. It was all...griddy.

It was just really neat to see. It has a fun expansion behavior when you open up the inline players, and I was surprised that you can sort by view count or filter by duration.

If you've visited the newly launched Yahoo! India Local (beta) site, you can let others know that you've been there. And that's as easy as saying 'i've been there'. Just leave your footprint behind and they'll know. For example, check out how many people have been to this famous South Indian restaurant called MTR in Bangalore.

Ain't that cool?

Wow, just a few bits of news out today (and by "few" I'll note that the number is just barely south of double digits), but that aside, you want to know something Cool, don't you?

Well, looking at the press releases, here's a little something that is darn right cool that seemed to get lost in the noise. That's something we here at Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day simply can't abide. MyBlogLog (honestly, I'm not being paid by them, they're just that prolific) released a nifty feature that lets you scan all of the various social services they know about for any of your IDs. That's pretty cool. What's even cooler is how they go about doing that. They've got their own little bot farm that they're running which queries the services and returns your results. What's equally cool for us is the fact that this is a damn simple configuration using a number existing Open Source projects that anyone here can tap into for their own evil purposes. So, faster results for you, less headaches for us. It's a win-win scenario that I'm pushing him to make an OpenSource product.

(Sorry, using my outside voice again.)

Pretty damn cool.

The My Yahoo! Blog will occasionally post about new modules that they especially like, which is a great way to find solid new additions to your My Yahoo! page (another pretty cool way -- browse over to the What's New page, listed in your page navigation, which presumably is programmed to hold a couple of editorially favored modules that you can drag into your own My Yahoo! page). For instance, one of their recent entries was for a new Flickr module, which let's you pull in recent content from Flickr in either thumbnail or slideshow form. I actually bring this up specifically because the default view, showing you your own photos, didn't seem particularly useful to me, given that you should be pretty well aware of which photos that you've uploaded and likely will not need to be reminded of them every morning that you visit your My Yahoo! page. However, it's loaded with options -- you can pull in photos from your Sets, Groups, Contacts, and Favorites, or just Everyone's photos or the most Interesting among those -- and it does remember those preferences (as well as the choice of thumbnail vs. slideshow view) after reloading, making it a far more exciting module. It was a nice amount of persistent personalization that really does make sense for something you'd want to put into Your Yahoo!.

Rejoice ye who live beneath the cutting edge!

Wait, that doesn't sound quite right. Still, i've you've yearned to switch to Firefox 3, you know that one of the things that held you back were the number of really useful add-ons that aren't yet ported to Firefox 3.

Well, one of them now is.

It's very much beta still (much like Firefox 3), so make sure you give feedback and report bugs.

This is one of those features that I'm sure everyone except me had already noticed, but hey, it's news to me. Well, news for me, actually. The layout of the Yahoo! News top page had always struck me as interesting because it's very tall and has a ton of content -- scrolling way down to find my Sports news was quite a drag, and I frankly found the Odd News section way more interesting than Health or Travel. Of course, had I paid closer attention, I would have seen the links to Personalize the News Home Page, allowing me to add, remove, and reorder all the aggregated news modules on the page. Sports, Technology, Odd News, welcome to the top of the page! Opinion, sorry, you didn't make the cut. Try again next year.