Yahoo! Local has seen a lot of new features over the past year. According a recent JupiterKagen study people have taken note of its value:

"Local advertising media should broaden their distribution using syndication and data services to compete with portals," said David Schatsky, President of JupiterKagan. "Yahoo! currently has more market share than the next five services combined, including both Google's and MSN's local services."

I think there is a real possibility of being too little, too late if existing local media do not starting acting soon. I also think Yahoo! would be amiss if they didn't provide local media with the means to build branded local channels.

Think Yahoo is going the way of the dinosaur because of Google's recent roll outs which make it look more and more like Yahoo? Don't be too sure.

But it only helps to irritate the masses when Yahoo!s get excited about the kewl factor and forget that bright shiny apps sometimes lack usability. Such was the case with the Yahoo! Local 4th of July Mashup.

This nifty app was presented to visitors at www.yahoo.com as the front-center feature on July 4th (US Independence Day). Launch it and wow! it looks kewl. but move the map to your city (it's a safe assumption you don't live in one of the cities on the app's short list) and it looks more like poop.

This is apparently a demonstration of what can be done but it's not actually doing it. So why place it on the front page? The end result is to feed the angst of people trying to stick with Yahoo!.

Usability should be prioritized far above the kewl-factor when making these placement decisions - unless trying to impress fellow developers while disappointing users are the objectives.

While visiting the Yahoo! Messenger with Voice landing page, I noticed a plugin being promoted that I saw real value in using. It is the Gamechannel plugin.

For those of you who haven't heard of Gamechannel, it is a feature of Yahoo! Sports where you can open up a small browser window that streams real-time data about whatever game (baseball, football, etc.) you want to keep an eye on. It's pseudo animated and relies on eye-catching graphics to provide as much information as is possible in a limited space.

So after seeing the plugin being promoted and realizing no link was being provided to it, I raced over to the Application Galley for Messenger Plugins and searched for "gamechannel." Nothing! Awk... What could this mean? So I backed out and using Y! Search looked for "messenger plugin gamechannel." Near the top I see a link to the India localized Application Gallery. What the heck? So I went there and found the Gamechannel plugin. I downloaded it and am happy to announce it's better than I expected.

Why it's not in the US Application Gallery is anyone's guess but I learned it's best to access the "Worldwide" Application Gallery in the future.

Today, Yahoo! opened a public beta for the new, rebuilt from the ground up, version of Y! Messenger for Apple Mac users. It requires OS X and includes many things the Windows version has had for some time such as Avatars/display images (not just smilies anymore), new sounds, webcam support and changeable status messages. It is equipped to be interoperable with Microsoft Live (MSN) Messenger when it and Y! Messenger open the gates (no pun intended).

I recently found myself with a Mac with OS X on my desk and have been using both Y! Messenger and iChat. The older Mac Y! Messenger was really crippled compared to what I was accustomed to on my WinXP machines. After all, it hadn't been updated in a long, long time. This new beta version addresses all of that.

My office mate is a die-hard Apple fan(atic). He hungrily downloaded and installed the new Y! Messenger for Mac. Upon launching it, he exclaimed, "Oh man, it's a complete knock-off of iChat!" He then listed off several new features as evidence. I pointed out that all these features have been available in the Y! Messenger for Windows for some time. That seemed to dissuade his concern about Yahoo! ripping off dear old mother Apple.

One item that made me go "Oh!" is the mail alert that appears on the desktop momentarily. It is semi-translucent black like a Widget. Very slick indeed. Yes, I guess I am easily amused.

 

I've been encountering problems with logging in to Yahoo! last night and again this morning. Sluggish to get into mail and I have been unable to log in to Messenger at all this morning. I thought it may be an isolated problem until I noticed a huge amount of TUYW traffic hitting Jason's post from two years ago which asks the biting question, "Is Yahoo IM and Yahoo email down for anyone?"Seems it may be.

Can a Yahoo! from the login/registration group or elsewhere shed some light on this for the benefit of the whole?

UPDATE: 8:30 Pacific Time
I've chatted with several folks (using Messenger, yeah) from various areas in Yahoo! who were surprised to hear that anything beyond Yahoo! running sluggish was happening. Granted I have yet to correspond with anyone from the Y! Registration Group and I think they will know best what's happening and what can be expected in the near future as far as a resolution or the need to be patient for a while.

I've noticed mail is taking almost an hour to arrive.

We'll keep you updated as we can. Keep an eye on the comments to this post.

UPDATE 10:50 Pacific Time

LaunchCAST in Y! Messenger won't launch. "Sorry, we were unable to connect to the media, possibly due to network issues. Error Code: 21"

 UPDATE: 1:00PM Pacific Time

According to an article on News.com,

 

"For a brief period early this morning, certain areas of Yahoo were inaccessible to a portion of registered users due to software-related issues," Yahoo spokeswoman Kiersten Hollars said in a statement. "We have identified the issue and corrected it. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience, and we apologize to our users who might have been affected. We take these issues extremely seriously, and Yahoo is instituting new processes to protect against similar incidents from occurring again."

I guess Kiersten doesn't read this blog since we had to find this out elsewhere. She really should. It'd probably help her a great deal.

 

As mentioned here a few days ago, a worm carried in email sent to Yahoo! email addresses was able to send more nuisance mail to the contacts listed in the victims' Yahoo! Address Books which, when opened using the non-beta version of Y! Mail, would cause the process to continue again.

Reports via the Associate Press service quotes a Yahoo! official:

"We have taken steps to resolve the issue and protect our users from further attacks of this worm," Yahoo spokeswoman Kelley Podboy said. "The solution has been automatically distributed to all Yahoo Mail customers, and requires no additional action on the part of the user."

Apparently very few Y! Mail accounts were affected and this had no affect on users of the new Y! Mail beta version.

 

Chatting smack with your soccer buddy while your favorite team is playing their's? You're going to love the new Yahoo! Messenger 2006 FIFA World Cup IMVironment™ so you can see all the action and stats while talking all that smack!

As you can see from the "chat cap" above, you can pick a match being played and see the current time into the game, score, lineup, bench roster and current stats (like shots on goal, offsides, etc.) as it all happens.

And don't forget about the all new 2006 FIFA World Cup Audibles.  GOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLL!!!!

 

Symantec is reporting (and I've already received some of these rogue emails in my Y! Mail today) that an email with the subject line, "New Graphic Site" contains

a worm that is written in JavaScript. It exploits a vulnerability in the Yahoo email service to send a copy of itself to the user's Yahoo email contacts. The worm cannot run on the newest version of Yahoo Mail Beta.

An InfoWorld article advises

Although Yahoo's Web e-mail has not been fixed, users are advised to update virus and firewall definitions and block any e-mail sent from av3@yahoo.com. The subject line of the e-mail with the worm says "New Graphic Site," and the body says "this is test."

In short, if you receive an email with this subject line, simply delete it (without opening or reading its contents) and move on. Y! Group moderators need to be especially cognizant to the potential damage this can have to their mail list subscribers.

Soon to be made available on the Yahoo! Downloads page (apparently, given the URL) will be a version of IE7PR2 optimized for Yahoo! Users. According to the download page:

Included in this upgrade:

• Yahoo! Search built into the browser
• Yahoo.com set as the default home page on the primary Tab
• Yahoo! Mail loads in your secondary Tab when you start IE7 Beta 2
  

Just in time for Y! Mail beta support for IE7.

Background and IE developer perspective is available in this post at the The Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog.

Thanks to kalphegor for digging this.

Yahoo! is tying their Yahoo! 360 property in with the Official FIFA World Cup site to provide rabid World Cup fans a blogging platform to provide user-contributed coverage of the games.

Think you have what it takes? Learn more and sign up here. Hurry, the games have started!

Hat tip to Ernie at the Yahoo! 360 Product Blog for the lead.

I posted recently about the Official site for the 2006 FIFA World Cup and how it utilizes Yahoo!-provided functionality with third-party and user-contributed content to create an otherwise seemingly impossibly fantastic site. I just came across the Yahoo! Gay Pride site and discovered another uber portal utilizing several Y! properties and content.


The Y! Gay Pride site combines the resources of flickr, upcoming.org, Y! Travel, Y! 360, Y! Podcasts, Y! Answers,  Y! Personals, Y! Local, Y! Avatars, Y! Music, Y! MyWeb, de.licio.us, Y! News, Y! Groups, Y! Health, Y! HotJobs, and Y! Shopping. These are all situated on the colorful and easy to use home page.

We're seeing more and more of these event-driven properties and as time goes by the archived content of these will carry forward making them even more valuable. Here's the short list:

Earth Day
St Patrick's Day
Gay Pride
Holiday Guide
2006 Turin Winter Olympics (Y! Canada)

You'll note that most of these have year-specific URLs which makes me wonder if these (and more, please) will be perpetual properties. We can only hope.

The folks at Y! Cool Thing of the Day were talking about using the FIFA 2006 World Cup site calendars to add event dates to your Yahoo! Calendar. That was yesterday. Today there's a follow up that gave me a new paradigm on sharing Y! Calendars.

If you have more than one event to share with others (friends or the world), you can use this simple "outside the box" method described by my friends at Y! Cool Thing of the Day.

1. Set up a Y! ID specifically for saving events on its calendar.
   
2. Create the events under that Y! ID's calendar.
3. Go to the "Sharing" settings (this link is near top right corner of any Y! Calendar page).
4. Set the Sharing Option to "Anyone can view my calendar."
5. Set the Event Sharing to "Public."
6. Click "Save."

Then all you need to do is tell your friends or the world to add this as a Time Guide to their Y! Calendars using the following steps (shamelessly clipped from Y!CTOTD):

1. Go to your Yahoo! Calendar
2. Click on "Edit" next to "My Time Guides" (top right)
3. Click on "Add/Edit Friends" next to "Friends' Calendars"
4. Enter the Y! ID for the calendar and click "Add"

The same thing applies for Yahoo! Groups' calendars. They can appear on personal calendars as Time Guides as well. It's all good.

Bad Widgets has published PornHole Widget for use with the Yahoo! Widget Engine that will provide an ongoing stream of images to your desktop, dialed in by you in the widget options to be tame or raw and geared to one gender or the other as desired.

A knowing wink and a nudge is due to Fleshbot for pointing this out.

Chris, my counterpart over at The Unofficial Google Weblog, posts about getting an inkling about a Google Scrapbook service. That got me thinking about what it could be. Yahoo! 360º sprang to mind and I realized how it is really a digital/media scrapbook - a place to save and share thoughts, reviews of businesses, photos, links, lists, associations with others, etc.

In a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking I put out the question, if it had been named Scrapbook instead of 360º, would people have understood more intuitively how to go about using it? I think they would have.

An overhaul of the Yahoo! Photos property, the most substantial improvement to the property since Yahoo! Photos was initially launched in 2000, will soon be rolled out to Yahoo! accounts worldwide. Unlike the Y! Mail Beta, users will not have the option of switching back to the original version once converted. But there are several reasons to be rid of the "old" version.

For starters, the information you can assign to each photo includes tags (comma separated tags no less - my favorite) for easy locating later, ratings to help the better photos rise to the top, sharing at the photo level (not at the album level like before), comments by friends (a la Flickr) and photo details (this looks like the camera provided data is being used).

When first accessing the new Y! Photos property, you have easy access to the three primary functions - add photos, select your own photos using tags or preassigned albums, and view your friends' photos. Speaking of friends, how are they assigned in the new Y! Photos? They can come from your Y! 360 friends, Flickr contacts, Y! Messenger contacts and your Y! Address Book.


The user interface is updated to today's drag-n-drag standard (no more checking boxes and refreshing pages). For instance, in the screen cap below you can see the view of "All Your Photos" which has several 'Action' buttons at the top. Simply drag the photo(s) you want to perform the action on into the 'drop zone' (my term) below the buttons and then click on the button.


So far, it's truely impressive. The new Y! Photos is smartly designed for the family user who wants to collect their photos, print them occasionaly at Target and on coffee mugs. They want to give their friends access and to view photos their friends want to share but they are not trying to reveal their photo collection to the world. And that is the principal difference between those who will like Flickr (global exposure/RSS feeds) and those who will like Y! Photos (sharing with friends and family).

I'll post more here later. Feel free to leave comments with any specific questions or concerns and I'll do my best to answer them.

And no, I have no idea how you get into the beta group. To check to see if you have been invited, go to Y! Photos after logging in with your Y! ID and look for "Join Beta" next to the "Help" link. If it's there, you're being offered the opportunity to try it during this limited beta.