Yahoo Adds "Geolinks" to Mail

location based services

Brian Timoney sent a heads up that Yahoo was helpfully putting blue links on locations in the text of his incoming Yahoo e-mail messages. From there he could save the address to an address book or see a map. I've got a Yahoo account and tried to duplicate it with the new beta version. No luck. I switched back to the old version and saw this.Yahoo explains that you can turn the feature off and that more shortcuts are coming.Brian describes it this way:
I guess it's another step towards the semantic web or just the web-based guys integrating the map piece with the rest of their offerings.


Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Yahoo at 15:56 Comments (3)


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And if I don't want to share my private address?
#1 Jim (Link) on 2006-11-13 16:20 (Reply)
If you don't want to share your address, don't type it into a form or email and click send.No one is going to go scraping for your information you wish to keep private. This is for people like my mother who will see an address in an email an write it down on paper so that she can then go to an online map and retype it so she can get directions. If ask her why she does this she says that the search field for the map is 1 line and the address is on 2. So she can't copy and paste.I teach people to you Firefox and open the map in a 2nd tab so that you can switch back and forth to copy and paste twice. But this solution simplifies that.So back to your concern; This feature helps people like my mother get directions to addresses she sees on a page (in this case email) in her web browser. If you don't want her to get directions to your private address, don't email it to her. No one's privacy is being violated here.
#1.1 Richard Bronosky (Link) on 2006-11-14 10:05 (Reply)
BTW - In the new version of Y! Maps (Flash one) you can paste a two line address into the single line address box on the Maps site and it will automagicaly include the whole thing as well and not truncate it... of course if your address comes from Yahoo! Mail, you don't need to worry about this any more with the new integration.
#1.1.1 Jeremy Kreitler on 2006-11-14 12:42 (Reply)