Yahoo Hacks New Shopping, Travel Products

Though the intent of the Hack Day focuses on creating nifty applications while taking an enjoyable break from the daily grind, the efforts sometimes yield something that’s so good, they have to share it with everybody.

Bradley Horowitz, VP, Advanced Development at Yahoo, blogged on Yodel Anecdotal about a couple of applications that have made the grade. These products put a new twist on the existing services they complement.

For shoppers, the Shop by Color hack offers a palette of 56 hues for refining product searches. Click on a color, and it returns results for mint green or black or whatever the shopper chooses.

Clothing shoppers will likely be the group that finds Shop by Color most useful, but Horowitz wrote that beauty, home & garden, and electronics categories also benefit from this new hue of search.

The MapMixer for Yahoo Travel combines maps uploaded by users with Yahoo Maps of an area, and gives those uploaded maps Yahoo’s functionality. One example shows a map of USC’s main campus overlaid on the much more generic map of the area.

These maps can be embedded in sites and blogs for sharing with others. It’s an amazing little use of technology that should make MapMixer a very popular and useful tool.