Things I found at Yahoo! I didn’t know they had

Starting at a new company is a good opportunity to do a survey and discover all the nooks and crannies that you may not have seen when you were outside. For instance, I had a few things on my list of services I wanted that turn out already exist.

First lets go through the list of things I wanted:

1) Online bookmark storage
a) Appropriate access controls so I can share with everyone, friends, and no one.
b) Keeps a copy of the page I’ve bookmarked so it can be searched later
c) Imports all my current bookmarks from both browsers and online services
d) Lets me organize them by tagging

Del.icio.us, another Yahoo property, used to satisfy only d), now it does a) and it never did c) particularly well. Turns out that Yahoo has another property that does all of this, MyWeb. If you’re interested in sharing bookmarks with me, just invite me as a friend on there, my username is spullara. What is really nice is that whenever I find a bug or feature in a property I can go and file them directly in the bug tracking system. Maybe one day we’ll expose that to the world, at least for our stuff in betas. Today you have to go through the feedback mechanism and don’t get to see other peoples suggestions. There is a discussion board for developers but that is a different target audience.

2) RSS to Other gateway
a) Support email, phone, and IM
b) Easy to sign up and manage

I had been looking at a few of them but it turns out Yahoo has one that does this pretty well in the beta of Yahoo! Alerts.

3) Few click upload to Flickr from my phone

I had even gone so far with this one as to rename the email address as AAA Flickr, so it would be the first one on the list to reduce the number of clicks to about 5–6. With ZoneTag, not only do I get 2 click upload but it also adds geo tagging to my Flickr photos and uploads in the background. Definitely a big improvement over the many click synchronous email method.

4) Best practices for Web 2.0

Whatever Web 2.0 means, you know it has to have a cool user interaction model, these patterns can really help out. I’ve used Dojo, Prototype, and GWT but this resource on YDN, is much more useful than a bunch of APIs or tools.

I know this all sounds like a big advertisement, but since I found these things useful, maybe someone else would. Since none of this stuff makes any money though, I should add one more thing:

Search the Web (Come on, try it, it won’t hurt I promise)

Where to find cool new Yahoo! stuff:

Yahoo! Next
Yahoo! Developer Network
Yahoo! Research