So I was having breakfast yesterday with the design manager for Maps and local at Yahoo! and he told me a story.
A part of a plane fell off and landed somewhere near Chicago. The reporters were scrabbling to get to the scene to interview the affected, and went to Yahoo Maps to map the way there. They saw the new business finder and were able to use it to phone up locals to get their reactions, and thus were able to scoop their competition.
I like this story because it reminds us with our personas and our user research and so on that the tools we build will be used a hundred ways we didn’t expect and could never expect. And that makes me kinda happy.