Product Pulse – March 20, 2009

Posted March 20th, 2009 at 7:06 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 4 Comments / Filed in: Product Pulse

Whether you’re celebrating Nowruz, Ostara, Shunbun no hi, or the vernal equinox, today is the first day of spring, people! Rebirth, revival, renewal, the end of a long cold winter, and a time to see if you can actually balance an egg on its point. Here’s what we fêted this week:

• omg! celebrity mamas!: The ever-popular gossip site, omg!, is giving you one more way to obsess about the lives of the rich, famous, and far-too-photographed. This week, realizing that you can’t seem to get enough of Katie/Suri, Gwen/Kingston, Angelina/(pick one) on omg!’s Goddess blog, the team has launched “Spotlight to Nightlight,” a biweekly video program that peers into the lives of celebrity mothers. Each three- to five-minute episode features host Ali Landry (former Miss USA and famed “Doritos Girl”) chatting up a different celebrity mom, discussing parenting tips or the latest mama making headlines. Ever wonder how much a starlet’s nanny makes? Get addicted here.
• IE8 4 Y!: Microsoft’s brand new Internet Explorer 8 browser launched this week. Minutes later, we made a Yahoo!-optimized version available. What’s in it for you? Easy access to Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mail, our toolbar, and our homepage. You’ll get instant visual results for weather, stock quotes, and movie reviews/showtimes when you use the browser’s search box (i.e., a three-day weather forecast shows up right inside a search pulldown menu). And, no matter what site you’re on, you can always access a preview window to check your Yahoo! Mail. More on the Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Mail blogs. Download IE 8 optimized for Yahoo! here. (Not available for Macs. Duh.)
• Find photos with fast filters: Ever searched for just the right photo but gotten lost in a sea of stuff you don’t want? Yahoo! Image Search has just added a few new filters to hasten your mission. You can now narrow your scope by selecting black & white vs. color, restricting results to images that are either from Flickr or not, or even specifying the dimensions of the shot you’re after. And they promise more cool stuff to come. More here.
• Sometimes it’s the little things: The Flickr team rolled out two small tweaks that mean so much. If you’ve often found yourself irked by the “loading…” message you got when trying to narrow down your list of contacts, behold the people picker! It’s now lightning-fast when trying to find someone in your Contact List, share an image, or send Flickr mail. But wait, there’s more. For Flickr Pro members, the Stats page now shows real-time data for the day (no more waiting til midnight) and lets you drill down for daily details on up to 28 of the last days. More here and here.

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Tagged: Flickr, IE8, microsoft, omg!, Product Pulse, yahoo! image search, yahoo! search

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4 Comments Add your own

Achille | March 23rd, 2009 at 9:36 am

Very cool!

Wilvert | March 25th, 2009 at 4:02 pm

Hi.
I’m posting here because I was worry about the relationship between yahoo and microsoft.
You guys are partner, or MS bought yahoo or something like that?, I ask that because you only put attention on Explorer and write the sentence “Download IE 8 optimized for Yahoo! here. (Not available for Macs. Duh.)”, what about firefox, safari, opera, and, the unknown for you, konqueror (I use it, I’m a Linux user)
I liked yahoo services and products because was really innovating, but the preferences are very strong now, for me, is loosing interesting about yahoo at the pass of the time.
See you.

Nicki Dugan | March 27th, 2009 at 12:34 pm

@Wilvert: Nope, Yahoo! remains an independent company! The Mac comment related to IE8 not being available for Apple products — no bias on our part. Also, you’ll note that we also have a Yahoo! version of Firefox 3 as well as a number of plugins and defaults for both Firefox and Safari. But you’re right — not many resources devoted to Konqueror at the moment!

Wilvert | April 3rd, 2009 at 4:56 pm

Ok!, that answer reassured me.
I’ll check the yahoo version firefox 3 (I hope works in Linux version)
By the way, there some forum about yahoo and linux?, I know yahoo dont present a lot (maybe nothing) for linux, like widgets or that funny stuffs, but just for curiosity if a forum exist.
Thanks for the answer and keep surprising us with innovating products!!