My Yahoo! Blog

Improved: Personal Assistant.

A few weeks ago, we told you about the Personal Assistant. You asked for more options and we have them ready for you.

• Want to see movie showtimes at your favorite theater? We added Movies.
• Looking for quick access to your Bookmarks? That’s an option too.

Oh, and we included Scoreboard and Inside My Yahoo! too. Check ‘em out.

Treats for your page.

Just in time for trick-or-treat season, we’re unveiling a new Halloween theme. It’s all there: a spooky graveyard, ghosts, bats, jack-o-lanterns and more.

So why not treat your page to a new theme? And while you’re there, check out these other fun choices to get in the spooky spirit.

• Ghost Droppings: a guide to all things creepy
• Candy Blog: find out which treats you should give out
• Dracula Blogged: wow, even Dracula is blogging
• Hometown Tales: spooky tales from towns around the world

(Personalize This Page > Change Color > Seasonal > Halloween)

Enjoy!

TV fans: you spoke, we listened!

Your feedback on our first attempt at new TV Listings was emphatic: it was too big, too clunky, and too limiting. So guess what we’ve done over the past few weeks? We rebuilt it, taking into account the things you asked for.

We’ve fixed several things
• The listings grid recognizes your theme and better fits into various column layouts.
• We revised the prime time defaults (8 p.m for ET and PT, 7 p.m. for CMT).
• If you click on a show and come back, the listings now “remember” where you were.
• Your favorite channels on Yahoo! TV will appear in your TV Listings on My Yahoo!.

We’ve also given you a lot more control
• Want a grid that suits your layout? You choose to display 1, 2, or 3 hours at a time.
• Are you a night-owl or an early bird? Set “primetime” to be any time you want!
• You can choose to have the listings start out at primetime OR at the current time, and then use the “Now” and “My Primetime” links to jump between them.
• Seeing wrong times at the top of the listings? We now show you the time zone associated with your account and give you a link to the profile page where you can update it.

(Just click on the “Module Options” gear icon to adjust any of these settings.)

We’ve got more work to do
In some browsers, there are display issues if you have too many hours in a grid that is too narrow. If this is just too much to bear, consider moving the listings to a wider column or use the “Module Options” to display fewer hours.

Some of you are still having trouble finding listings for your area, and we’re sorry about that. We are working with the listings data provider to sort these out on a case-by-case basis.

And we are working with the team over at Yahoo! TV to increase the number of show titles that have links to more detail. Please stay tuned.

Thanks for using My Yahoo! and enjoy the new listings!

–james

My Yahoo! Product Manager

Know your neighborhood.

Following up on my previous post…

Once you’ve moved to a new place you can also use My Yahoo! to keep track of what’s going on in your new neighborhood. The San Francisco page and Yahoo! Local module are a good start.

The Food (first things first)
Yelp! has a great online community of foodies who eat out and share their experiences. You can add a module with all restaurant reviews for your neighborhood. First head to Yelp! Locations and click on the city nearest you.

If you’re running Firefox 2.0 or Internet Explorer 7, you can just click on the RSS icon and follow the prompts to add the feed to My Yahoo!. Now you have a feed of the latest restaurant reviews for your city.

Music and More
Upcoming is a wonderful place to find concerts and other events. And you can easily add a listing of events tailored to your city. To do this:

1. Head to Upcoming and enter your location in the “Where” box
2. Click on “All Events”
3. Click on “Subscribe” and “Add to My Yahoo!”
…and you’re done.

Events and Such
Finally, outside.in is a great site that combines neighborhood news, event listings, and more into a single page. They even publish an RSS feed for every zip code. To add their feed to your My Yahoo! page:

1. From My Yahoo!, click “Personalize this Page”
2. Click “Add RSS Feed” and enter in http://outside.in/rss.php?region=98101; replacing 98101 with your zip code

Hope some of my local favorites modules inspire you. And if you have some great neighborhood modules of your own, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Enjoy!

-Joseph, My Yahoo! Product Manager

Finding a new place.

As James said a while back, the folks on our team spend a lot of time using our product. For example, a few months ago I decided to look for a new apartment in San Francisco. It’s no easy task to find a good, cheap apartment in the city; places rent quickly so you have to move fast.

Like any respectable geek I turned to craigslist, which lets you search by size, price and neighborhood. Here’s a search for one bedroom apartments under $2,000 a month in the “Noe Valley” neighborhood. Simple, right?

But the real magic is that you can add your search to your My Yahoo! page. That way, you’ll get an up-to-the-minute list of the new apartment listings (or whatever else you’re searching for). Here’s how:

1. Run a search on craigslist for the type of apartment you’re looking for.
2. Find the RSS icon at the bottom of the page and copy the link.
3. Head back to My Yahoo!, click “Personalize this Page,” “Add RSS Feed,” and paste in the URL from step 2. Click “Add.”

Once the hamsters finish running you’ll see a new module on your page containing the results of your search. When you finally find your new dream home, simply delete away.

Enjoy!

-Joseph
My Yahoo! Product Manager