Thanks to a new partnership with Rhapsody, Yahoo adds playable music clips to their search results. Give it a try: Search for an artist like Madonna, and play popular tunes (up to 25 full-length tracks a month) at the top of the results in-browser. The main Yahoo Australia site doesn't sport this feature yet, but you can access it at the global search sub-page. How does Yahoo do with your favourite artist? Yahoo [via cNet]

Read More »

Yahoo Pipes mashup SnackUpon takes the ideas behind two popular web applications—Delicious and StumbleUpon—and creates a customised RSS feed that delivers content you might like based on your Delicious bookmarks. The idea is brilliant: You already subscribe to sites with your newsreader because they deliver content that you like, but you don't have much control over what content the publisher of that site covers. With SnackUpon, it's like you've created a blog that publishes content based solely on your likes. Granted, that assumes the SnackUpon works as advertised, but after testing it out on my Delicious account, this is one feed I'm planning to keep in my newsreader. If you plug in your Delicious ID, let's hear how well SnackUpon matches your taste in the comments.

Yahoo officially launches Fire Eagle, a web service that stores your current physical location in the world and syncs it with applications you set up on your own terms. Sign up for Fire Eagle, then add applications that use your location information—like BriteKite, Dopplr, and MovableType. Fire Eagle acts as the go-between, storing your location, and sharing it with apps according to rules you set up.

Fire Eagle allows you to share your locations with other sites and services safely through a secure server - you are always in control. You can decide to share your location with any site that can use it, and even choose how much detail to give that application (exact point, neighbourhood, city, state, country). There are many applications that can use your Fire Eagle location! For example, you can use Fire Eagle to update your location on your Facebook profile; or embed a badge on your blog or MySpace that shows roughly where you are.

Read More »

I'd be inclined to argue that the biggest problem with Flash sites is that they can add needless complication and download weight without actually improving efficiency. However, for sites which are heavy on Flash (games and video being the obvious offenders), there's always been a bigger problem: content in Flash rarely if ever gets picked up by search engine indexes, rendering it near-invisible to casual visitors.
That problem may recede with news that Google is now automatically indexing all text labels within Flash files, meaning that those elements will now show up in relevant searches. (Yahoo! is also planning similar changes but hasn't made them live yet). No special changes are required to have Flash content indexed, though it may be a few days before any relevant material shows up in searches. If you have Flash material you don't want indexed, Google recommends incorporating those purely as graphic elements, as it only indexes specifically marked text (so no video subtitles, we assume). In any event, don't be surprised to see more Flash material show up when you search Google, and a possible new round of SEO wars as sites fight to top the rankings.

Discovered a fun little feature in Yahoo Mail this week that made me wish for the same in Gmail: the Subject-O-Matique, a random subject line inserter. When you just can't think of the right subject for your message, click the subject button in the new version of Yahoo Mail to automatically fill in something cheeky or goofy. Hit the play button above to see some examples. The closest Gmail's got to this is its random signature experimental feature.

Read More »

Yahoo unveils a "sneak peek" of a new product that aims to bridge the gap between your web browser and desktop—BrowserPlus, a desktop utility that enables richer browser interaction, like drag and drop file uploads. The BrowserPlus utility is available for Windows and Mac at the moment and works with Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 7. There are only three demo applications that use BrowserPlus: a Flickr drap-and-drop image uploader, an IRC chat client, and for the web monkeys, a JSON inspector. In short, BrowserPlus is more proof-of-concept than anything else. But, with Google ramping up Gears, Firefox 3 building in offline webapp support, and Yahoo busting out BrowserPlus, looks like your web browser and your desktop are going to be more than just friends in the coming months. The BrowserPlus sneak preview is a free download for Mac and Windows.

Read More »

Since most of you said you've stuck to Google Docs over Zoho Suite because you already have a Google account, Zoho Suite added the ability to log on with your existing Google or Yahoo account. You can even import your contacts from Google or Yahoo into Zoho.

Read More »

Yahoo's testing out a new kind of search page layout: when you search for broad-reaching terms (like Einstein, and happily, Lifehacker), you may arrive on their beta "Glue Page," which groups web page results, images, Wikipedia, news, blogs, and video clips into separate areas on the page. See it for yourself.

Read More »

All platforms: Normally we don't feature individual widgets that require downloading a separate engine to run them, but the Informer Yahoo Widget might be worth the effort. Place system monitoring tools right on your desktop with Informer, like Wi-Fi signal strength, system uptime, and disk use. Keep tabs on your favourite web site feeds and inboxes with RSS and email notifications for Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and any other POP or IMAP account. Add shortcuts to local folders, favourite web sites and images as well with Informer. Check out Cybernet News' walkthrough of what you can do with this full-featured widget, which is a free download for Mac or Windows and requires the Yahoo Widget Engine to run.

Mac OS X only: The latest beta 3 release of Yahoo Messenger for Mac adds voice and voicemail capabilities a la Skype. Using Yahoo Messenger, computer to computer voice calls are free, and you can purchase a PhoneOut and/or PhoneIn account to call land line or cell phones, or receive calls on your computer, or even set up call forwarding to land lines or mobile phones. (Rates start at 1 cent/minute in the U.S.) You can also send SMS messages with Yahoo Messenger, and get free voicemail; Yahoo Messenger delivers voicemail as an email attachment to the address you specify. Skype's had all these features for Mac and PC for some time now, so Yahoo's pretty late to the game—but it's still good to have options.

Read More »