Yahoo Hack days are a lot of fun, and some pretty interesting stuff comes out of them. But a persistent question is whether or not they are much more than fun - and if any of these hacks ever make their way into actual products.
The answer, apparently, is yes. Tonight Yahoo is announcing two product feature launches that were originally created at Yahoo Hack Days. - Shop By Color and MapMixer.
MapMixer
MapMixer is a tool that lets users “pin up” their own image over Yahoo Maps. The two images are melded to create a hybrid version that can be saved and viewed privately or made public - users can also adjust opacity and perform other tweaks to make it look just right. The ideal use is to add a very detailed map to the existing, less detailed Yahoo map. The melded map can also be embedded in a non-Yahoo website. See images to right and below for examples.
Google Maps allows various types of annotations, but nothing exactly like this.
Shop By Color
Shop by Color is a new Yahoo Shopping feature that lets users search or narrow results by selecting one of 56 different color hues instead of typing the color in manually.
Like.com, which we’ve covered recently, also allows image searching with non-text as the input. What Yahoo is launching is a lot different, but it is exciting to see image search moving beyond purely descriptive text as the input. Images can be queried directly, whereas previously just the metadata around an image could be queried.
Both were developed at Yahoo!’s Q1 2007 internal hack day on March 23rd. Hayro Kolukisaoglu and Sundeep Tirumalareddy created Shop by Color, and Nimit Maru created MapMixer.
MapMixer sounds like a very cool technology… hybrid feature may make current boring maps into something really cool looking if properly done but with the zooming in/out, either you use a really large image to avoid pixelation or you will be stuck with jaggies all over the place
I guess being able to upload a vector image or even .swf image as background would be better in this case.
jon
Mike,
Nice post. Here is a podcast I did under embargo and published tonight at 9pm on the same topic
http://readwritetalk.com/2007/.....ion-yahoo/
Thanks,
Sean
Well I thought that we already pass the startup-going-get-rich-through-simple-mashups mentality….
All these things are nice, as feature sets, not products. Are we building features or products?
http://productmanagement1.blog.....rated.html
Mapmixer is really cool! We know Yahoo! Maps is using Flash, is this one of the advantages by using flash? I heard it is very easy (compared to Ajax) to do overlay stuff in Flash.
June,
This is using Yahoo’s AJAX maps, not the flash ones.
(Yeah, Yahoo’s had AJAX maps for a while, just not so good about letting folks know that they’re out there.)
Mapmixer is a really cool idea. Great job.
Go Bears!
You can shop by color on Etsy. Nice feature, not going to win my business necessarily.
Shop by color was first seen at ShopWiki more than a year ago.
Google Maps has been doing this for almost 2 years now. Granted you had to “hack” the JavaScript to get it going, but nowadays its as simple as a few lines of code to do an overlay map just like this. Because it’s so easy to do with Google Maps, there have been several mashup websites that have already provided this functionality for Google Maps as a 3rd party extension. Where is the tech crunch coverage of those websites?
I’m gonna buy these people!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Fashion IQ was the first to deploy the shop by color feature wayyy back in March 2005. Looks like it was a good idea!
-Chris
This is really easy to use. To me, for this function, Yahoo MapMixer >> Microsoft MapCruncher >> Google stuff.
Here, a few points could be made:
1. For this sort of things, 100% online platform is going to be the destination for the mass.
2. For the technology, it seems a time lag of a year or two would not change the history of the topic. After all, it is still a marginal technology. The critical issue is its simple and fast implementation when it is there.
3. The most important and probably generic issue would be map amount and quality. We have to leverage both, and remember that the audience in this case is the mass. Vast amount and good quality will not come without dedicated, significant investments. It seems the future will be a sub-optimal one after integrating both aspects.
Really interesting to observe location-specific data - both false negative and false positive cases are having serious consequences, let alone the first impression.