a blog by Ian Kennedy
So there was quite a bit of hoopla when Mr. Cruise flew into town on his P-51 to pay us a visit. We got to see exclusive clips of the upcoming Mission Impossible 3 and Terry Semel announced that there would be more collaborations with the actor in the future.
Today, Yahoo Answers has an open question where anyone can try and stump Tom Cruise with a trivia question about any of his movies. Check it out. Can you stump me in one of my own movies?
Yahoo News launched a new feature now in beta which uses your location data to pull in news from major sources in your region. The module is located on the news.yahoo.com page
The Yahoo Developer Network just launched an Application Gallery. Similar to the Widgets Gallery, this site shows off the best applications built on top of the Yahoo APIs. There’s the opportunity to upload and submit your applications to the gallery and, once they are there, have them reviewed and showcased.
This comes as frosting on top of today’s announcement of a whole new set of APIs, the first out the gate being the commercial Shopping API which gives third parties a cut of any revenue generated by their sites. Jeffrey McManus who is presenting the Yahoo Developer Network here at eTech posted about the other APIs which includes support for browser-based authentication so apps can take advantage of their user’s Yahoo profile and information tied to that profile.
I’m sharing a room with Chad Dickerson here at eTech and he was up until the wee hours last night and up again at the crack of dawn putting the finishing touches on a prototype called Checkmates. The application, which runs on your cellphone, uses a combination of APIs to show your location superimposed on a map along with the locations of your Flickr friends (as long as they also have the Checkmates running and have declared their location.
For eTech, Chad posted this morning about the Checkmates and mentions a special overlay where you can declare your location on an eTech map.
I’ve run into a snag b/c my Sprint cellphone won’t let me run my web browser while in Digital Roam mode (reception is not so hot inside the conference hall). I’ll try and install it later.
Netsquared, an arm of the non-profit advisory site, Techsoup, just posted an email interview I did with them about tagging. At the end of the interview, I also listed up a few examples of how Yahoo applications can be stitched together and used by non-profits (and other small organizations) to organize and inform their community.
Yahoo 360 added a cool little voting widget today so I took the opportunity to set up a snap poll on what Tivo is announcing tomorrow. I thought Yahoo Answers was cool, I can see myself creating all sorts of mischief with this feature!
If have a Yahoo ID, click through to my 360 blog and cast your vote. If you don’t hurry up and create one because the announcement is in just 10 hours.
I’m not going to post about this at length because Chad Dickerson pretty much sums up everything I wanted to say (although I do like Havi’s label of this as an early Valentine’s Day gift). Suffice to say, Yahoo has basically open-sourced all their UI designs so you no longer have to build widgets like sliders, tree controls, or calendars from scratch.
I have a quote by Leonard Lin on the bottom of my Yahoo 360 page. Now, more then ever, it rings true:
Part of the Yahoo! spiel is that they see themselves as having one of the world’s best kitchens for chefs to come in and do their thing. All I have to say is, there are mouths to feed. Let’s get cooking.
Those of you who follow sports on a regular basis probably already know this but if you’re like me and haven’t had the time to catch up on your TiVo backlog of Olympic coverage, Yahoo’s got a great micro-site which pulls it all together for you. Turin 2006 Winter Olympics on Yahoo! Sports has been specially formatted to host larger format photos (today’s shot is a great example), exclusive analysis, and also features RSS feeds of the latest news and medal counts.
I just moved to a new desk and was going through some of my old files when I came across this gem of a quote. Jim Griffin, whose claim to fame was to convince Aerosmith to upload a track of their music back in 1994, talks to Wired about MP3s and why they are not a threat to the recording industry.
Starbucks will sell you everything you need to be a pirate: the coffee pot, the beans, hell, they’ll give you a pamphlet that tells how to make every drink. They’re not worried because you’re coming back tomorrow. – Wired News, 1999
Create a good enough service at a compelling price and you’ll be able to keep them coming back for more.
I’ve been playing around with the recently updated Yahoo Music Engine which, for $5/month, will give you unlimited access to all the streaming audio you want. There’s a sharing component which plugs into Yahoo Messenger so that you can broadcast your collection of music to your Messenger buddies, regardless of geographic location. There’s also a recommendation engine that learns what you like so you can discover new music. For $5/month, there’s very little incentive to rip & burn your own cds – everything you have is right there waiting for you the next time you jack into the net.
UPDATE: Nice vote of confidence on YME from an Microsoftie.