Latest Posts from Download Squad

Yahoo!'s corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal, announced the availability of a new Yahoo! Music video player. This is a beta release and they have put up a slick user feedback mechanism for you to use in telling them how to make it better and what features rock (pardon the pun).

From the well-prepared tutorial the new features are:

• Video Lineup: control the videos you want to watch! Create a customized video lineup, arrange and reorganize videos, monitor upcoming selections, and create your own session playlist.
• Easy video search: from within the video player, instantly find videos by searching for your favorite artists or video titles.
• Browse by category: get customized recommendations based on your video ratings, or choose from recommendations by category-Top 100, exclusive Nissan Live Sets, videos you've recently watched, and more!
• All new design: everything at your fingertips! Enhanced video player controls, simplified video search, and easier ways to browse content-all in one place, within one interface.
• Mac Compatible: now available for Macintosh OS X.

Read more »

One aspect of the Yahoo! experience that always left me shaking my head is the News Message Boards. Easily accessible from a "Discuss" link at the bottom of news stories, it was the stomping grounds of trolls and other hate mongers with little to no social value, unless of course you are a troll.

But now I say, "Hallelujah!" Break out the bubbly and do a little jig on the table because the powers that be at Yahoo! News have shut down the News Message Boards. The "Discuss" link has been replaced with a link labeled, "What happened to the "Discuss" option?" The message at the other end of that link takes you to a short explanation of how the boards were dominated by a few, links were difficult to embed and something bigger and better is soon to replace the old board system: "Over the next few months, we plan to offer new discussion forums based on topics in the news and incorporating the latest features to foster a better discussion for all of our readers."

Will it be an implementation of the new Yahoo! Message Board system or something digg/Netscape-like? Will it combine Yahoo! 360 blogging platform to be more like Newsvine? We'll have to wait and see.

Today, Ryan Kennedy demonstrated why he's the right guy to be the Yahoo! Mail Beta evangelist. One of the best-kept secrets within the new Yahoo! Mail Beta have been the search shortcuts. We've learned a little about them from Josh here and in Ryan's post today at the Y! Mail Updates blog. But the frosting on the cake is the complete reference page provided here.

Ryan promises this will be updated when new shortcuts are rolled out and existing ones change. Thanks Ryan!

The second best-kept secret? While holding down the Ctrl button, click on the Subject line of a viewed email. This generates a search result with all emails with the same subject line. A threaded view of sorts.

Yahoo! Go is the next generation of Yahoo! properties. It includes Y! Go Mobile for cell phone users, Y! Go Desktop for PC users (yet to be released) and Y! Go TV for television and multimedia PC users.

Y! Go TV (beta) was released a few months ago shortly following Y!'s acquisition of Meedio. The implementation was a stripped down version of Meedio's basic DVR product and was made available to US users as Y! Go TV for free.

Recently an upgrade to Y! Go TV was rolled out with several improvements but still as a beta.

• Picture in picture viewing capabilities
• View personal Flickr photostreams
• Support for more tuner/capture cards
• Overall user experience improvements (responsive and consistency of menus and navigation, video player and network experience)
• Movie recommendations
• Ability to access shared music from your local network

This latest upgrade supports many more tuners and the interface does appear more quick to respond and more intuitive to use compared with the original release.

Free streaming stock quotes have made an appearance on Yahoo! Finance with little to no fanfare. Above the charts on the individual stock pages and on Yahoo Finance's front page you will see . Click the "On" button provides a drop down display of streaming stock price information. Click on the "?" and learn that you can leave this open for up to 25 minutes and although these are streaming, they are not "real-time". They are delayed 15 minutes.

Streaming quotes has only been offered with real-time information as part of a Yahoo Finance premium service package.

It was almost a year ago when Yahoo! began including blogs as a subset of it's Y! News search results pages. Tonight I have notice that they are missing. There was a struggle as whether to include them within the News Search results or segregate them as was finally decided. I wonder if the battle with this decision is continuing.

No clues anywhere about not including them in search results anymore. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?


Updated 8/27/06 - I received information that this move was the result of the rampant splog problem and only a trickle of click-through traffic. Thus the overhead to operate it wasn't justified.

Second update 8/27/06: Greg Jarboe blogs: Brian Nelson, a Yahoo spokesperson, called me back to say the Blogs beta had been "temporarily taken offline to retool the offering."

So it depends on whether you believe internal communications or the PR group.

After a year's presence on Yahoo!, the Richard Bangs Adventures travelogue couldn't locate the minimum million followers it needed to continue. As a result, Yahoo! is pulling the plug on it.

Bangs and Kevin Sites were the poster children for Yahoo!'s exclusive content campaign last year. The Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone war zone commentary was able to garner the minimum traffic needed to continue on.

So far no other Yahoo! exclusive content contributors are reported to be discontinued.

The new Yahoo! Photos user interface is being made available to US users. The migration of accounts began tonight and is expected to take a while. It become available in a limited beta back in June and has now completed that phase.

The new version boasts of drag-and-drop features, tagging, dynamic albums, sharing, commenting and enhanced searching. Also included is the ability to download full-size photos without needing to be a premium services subscriber as it was before.

There are two features from the previous version which I feel are sorely lacking from the new. If I want to grant access to my photos to a friend, then I must send them an email explicitly sharing the photos or album with them. Before, I merely indicated which Y! IDs could see photos in an album. This could be a deal breaker for me and cause me to give Flickr another look. Secondly, the frame choices are cheesy at best and lack the feathering options (frosting the edges to create a soft edge instead of a hard edge to the photo). I used the feathering frame types many times and rarely used the other frames at all.

All-in-all, this is a tremendous jump forward for the Y! Photos property. Kudos to the team!

Something new has appeared at Yahoo! Answers. A rating toolbar for each question and for each answer. These provide the ability to quickly click on a "thumbs up/down" to rate each question/answer. There's a button to "report" the question/answer for abuse, another to email the question to a friend and another to add it to your "watch" list, MyWeb, de.licio.us, MyYahoo! or any other RSS reader.

That's all good and well, but how is this going to improve the community at Y! Answers? The Y! Answers blog says this will help "identify content that is valuable to the community" but does it bring it to the forefront while burying the crud? I don't see this happening now but hopefully it will happen soon.

According to James Derk in his Scripps Howard syndicated column, Yahoo! Answers is now a disaster. He says it was once useful but now is overrun with spam, chat-happy posters and others who simply disregard the guidelines knowing there will be little to no retribution.

I have to agree, sort of. It hasn't become the putrid cesspool the Yahoo! News Message Boards are, but can I see it coming.