And what’s the deal with Yahoo! Local URLs?

I’ve been using Yahoo! Local with some regularity since I still don’t know the area I live in all that well1. Today I had lunch with Steve and I eIM’ed him the URL of the place from Yahoo! Local. Let me tell you, that is one ugly looking URL:

http://local.yahoo.com/details;_ylt=
AtA3DivnL7En8XMvvq0P2PSHNcIF;_ylu=
X3oDMTBpZzIyMjd0BF9zAzk2NjEzNzY5
BHNlYwNzcg–?id=19555234&state=
CO&city=Arvada&stx=chilis&csz=Arvada
%2C+CO+80007&fr=&ed=
GjDDZK131DzBpU5TmkT8gVQRd8xYb.
_InUo3oAw2ZjMiHRGuwsU-&lcscb=5dUHDN3EejL

260 characters of ugliness.

Even the del.icio.us and Flickr’s GUID URLs are much better – merely because they are shorter. I wonder how many people have e-mailed out a Yahoo! Local URL to someone, only to have their e-mail program insert line breaks and break the URL2

Yahoo! is making a bunch of good decisions these days, I hope that implementing a better URL scheme for Local is one they get to soon.

  1. This is a side effect of working at home and not having to drive around every day. [back]
  2. Which, frankly is a bug in the e-mail program – but it something that should be avoided if possible. [back]