I just stumbled upon a cool feature of Yahoo! Unlimited (Yahoo!’s new subscription music service). It’s a feature that creates a playlist of music similar to the artist or song you are browsing — for some reason the feature isn’t available in album view.

For example, if you were browsing the artist page for Rush (for some unknown reason), there is a button called Create a Playlist of Similar Artists as shown below:

If you push this button, the Yahoo! Music Engine (the Yahoo! Unlimited client application) automagically creates a playlist of songs similar to Rush’s music. Here’s a view of the newly created Like Rush playlist tacked onto the end of my playlists.

Browsing the playlist, you can see what kind of songs Yahoo! thinks are similar to Rush. Overall, I’d say that it’s pretty good at picking similar songs for the playlist (at least in this example).

I’ll be playing around with this feature more to see how it aids in discovering new music.

P.S. You should probably sign up soon for the full year of Yahoo! Unlimited while it’s still only $60/year. As quoted over on the O’Reilly Radar, Jerry Yang says that the pricing for Yahoo! Unlimited is an “introductory price.”

I’d bet that Yahoo! Maps is probably the most trafficked mapping site on the web (or if not, for sure one of the top three). However, you wouldn’t know if from reading the recent news regarding Internet-based maps. But whatever, on to the mapping news.

The WSJ today reported on Microsoft’s announcement of its soon-to-be-released Virtual Earth product.

Virtual Earth, which will be run by Microsoft’s MSN unit, is part of a broader push by Internet companies to use aerial images and other graphical elements to more accurately recreate on the Internet how people might look for things in the real world. Mr. Gates, speaking at a Wall Street Journal conference in Carlsbad, Calif., said he expects Microsoft’s service to lift map-based searching to “a whole new level.” But he acknowledged, “There’s going to be a lot of competition in the mapping area.”

To get a better idea of some of the features of Virtual Earth, there’s a new video over on Microsoft’s Channel 9 demonstrating Virtual Earth. In the demo, they show a couple of “overlay” modes where you can overlay street names on top of a satellite image, or overlay locations of local shops on the satellite image. Pretty cool stuff. The UI is all browser based (no ActiveX stuff) and makes extensive use of AJAX, which makes interfacing with the maps much easier. That is, you can drag the map around with your mouse, zoom in and out with the scroll wheel and some other nifty features.

But back to Yahoo!. Jeez, even Amazon — a new comer to search and mapping with it’s A9 service (and more specifically, the A9 Yellow Pages service) — gets mentioned in the WSJ article.

In January, Amazon.com Inc. rolled out Block View, a feature that shows photos of storefronts alongside local search results that give the impression of walking up and down streets.

I really think that Yahoo! needs to examine how (or if?) they are doing PR. I’m sure that Yahoo! — especially since the launch Google Maps with its cutting-edge AJAX interface — is working on a new version of Yahoo! Maps. But again, you wouldn’t know what by reading the news. Not being mentioned at all when you are one of the leaders, if not the leader, in Internet mapping is clearly bad. As they say, any PR is good PR.

As the WSJ reports today in an article entitled Some Yahoo Investors Withhold Votes, some large shareholders withheld their votes for Yahoo!’s compensation-committee members:

…after corporate-governance firm Institutional Shareholder Services raised concerns about Chief Executive Terry Semel’s pay. At the annual shareholder meeting Thursday, holders withheld 16.7% of votes for Robert Kotick, 16.8% for Gary Wilson and 18.4% for Arthur Kern, the three board members who make up the compensation committee.

Part of Mr. Semel’s pay package amounts to:

…Mr. Semel received a bonus option to purchase 1.8 million Yahoo shares and an annual-review option to buy four million shares in March 2004, followed by a fully vested option to purchase 1.2 million shares, among other awards.

Then complain to the FCC. Your complaint is worth approximately 25,000 “votes.” Apparently, somebody in the government keeps track of these complaints.

But customer complaints continue to dog T-Mobile. In the fourth quarter of 2004, T-Mobile logged a rate of 4.3 complaints with the Federal Communications Commission per 100,000 customers; only Cingular had more at a 4.6 rate, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

This from an article in last month’s WSJ. Here’s a page I found on the FCC’s site about filing complaints.

There’s a pretty cool demo video of Microsoft’s new Office Communicator IM product over on Channel 9. Office Communicator is an enterprise IM solution that allows interconnection with both AOL’s AIM product and Yahoo!’s Messenger product. Some of the highlights of the video are:

• AOL AIM and Yahoo! Messenger integration
• Enterprise directory lookup
  • Search by IM name or email address
  • Lists phone numbers from directory
• PBX phone control via Office Messenger (cool!)
• Call forwarding and transferring control from Office Messenger
• VoIP calling from Office Messenger
• Live meeting data-sharing integration
• Conference calling integration (MCI service in this case)
• Discussion of security and encryption

I think the integration with PBXs is particularly cool. PBX systems seem to be designed to be as non-intuitive as possible — a big part of this is due to the limits of a phone’s interface (i.e., a simple keypad with no display or a very small display). Obviously, you can build a much richer interface on a PC. I imagine that it would take some effort by a company’s IT department to get all of this working, but the productivity benefits could make it worth while.

I know a lot of people at work use IM to check to see if someone is at their desk before placing a call. Now you can check and call with a simple click of the mouse.