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YahooGo

Yahoo! Go for TV.

Awesome. To me, this kind of set up is the future of television. Yahoo! Go is an application you download to your PC (not available on MAC yet) that acts sort of like a set top box. It is built to bridge the things you do on your computer and mobile device, with your TV. It's still in Beta, and there are a few bugs here and there-- but it's really well done. Here are some highlights:

1) Photos Access all your flickr or Yahoo! photos + your contacts photos. When you initially download the app. to your PC- you sign in with your flickr user/password. Then when you load Yahoo! Go -- you can easily access all your photos and view them on TV. The interface is clean and easy to use. You can navigate to sets, individual photos or play a slideshow. Really, really well done. I did notice a bug though in that, sometimes it has trouble accessing your flickr. Re-launching the application fixes this.

2) Music You can access any music stored on your PC, you can play a CD on your PC through your TV, or you can stream stations live. The stations usually play a 30 second commercial before beginning-- but only one. You can fast forward through the songs and no commercials interrupt this process.

3) Video Again, you can access any video currently stored on your PC. Go also allows you to do a web search (with a keypad you can navigate with your remote) for user-generated video. These videos took significantly longer to load than the videos already in the Yahoo! system. I particularly enjoyed the music video section. A 30 second advertisement was played before each music video- but there was a timer which displayed how many seconds of the commercial were remaining, and since the videos were several minutes, I really didn't mind. The ads in the music section were more irritating since there were no visuals. It was like listening to the radio while staring at a blank screen. Back to video-- they loaded quickly and the UI was really nice.

4) Extras: Yahoo! Go also includes a TV section where you can record your favorite shows directly to your PC-- it's almost like a Tivo inside your PC. You can also schedule shows and view what's currently on TV. Unfortunately I don't have a TV tuner card so I couldn't test this out. Go also clearly has plans for media sharing as they allow you to add other Yahoo! users so you can view their content as well. The videos section also features "Top Web Searches" a nice way to see what's going on online without having to turn on your computer.

Overall I think Yahoo! Go is a great experience. To me, this is the kind of experience we will all eventually have access to. Our media will just be stored on a server somewhere and we can choose what screen to view it on at any time, with the click of a button. This experience will be so much better than trying to transfer media from device to device, converting it for smaller/bigger screens, etc.

I'm really interested to see where they take this next....