“Yahoo’s Research Labs”:http://research.yahoo.com/, in a join effort with “O’Reilly”:http://www.oreilly.com/ media, launched on the 15th their “Buzz Game”:http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/bk/index.html project, a “stock market”-like game with fantasy money, where stocks vary with the ammount of searches that the product gets on Yahoo. Smart, smart indeed, I had this idea some time ago as it’d be a great project for “Google Labs”:http://labs.google.com, and look at it, Y!’s at it.

I kinda wanted to see how far they had gone with the idea, so I signed up. It doesn’t look bad at all but, and I wouldn’t be writing if there wasn’t a _but_, Yahoo could have made some choices in terms of development that would make the whole experience of using Buzz Game a little better.

Why not going the web 2.0 way and enriching the user experience with XmlHttpRequest that would avoid all the page refreshes for just about every action? Ajax powered web-applications are going to dominate the web world soon (think gmail, mapquest and a few others) because they make the experience better and much more practical. Data is loaded on-the-fly into the page, no need to refresh when you buy stock, or when something changes. A complex user interface becomes intuitive and fast.

I’m not also sure about their considerations on design patterns when doing the layout for this application, because although market pages appear to have had quite some thought given to them, navigation as a block didn’t, resulting in a poor navigation experience.

Apart from these two points, though, this is a great example on data shifting (_getting data you wouldn’t normally look at regularly - yahoo search data - and turning it into something else_). This sort of application is fascinating because it approaches the social computing model - the data we’re seeing here, updating live, is in fact produced all the time, by people all around the world using the Yahoo Search.

I too have been giving some thought to some data shifting ideas I had and may end up integrating some of them into my current projects - more on this soon, I bet.