Yahoo! Messenger Blog

We’re back!

February 4, 2010 on 9:49 am | In News | 8 Comments

Sorry, the blog was down overnight for a few hours. But we’re back! Sorry for any inconvenience.

Now get back to IM’ing!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

Webcam saves a life

February 3, 2010 on 10:19 am | In News | Add a Comment

In case you missed this story on the Yahoo! homepage today…

Earlier this week, a woman in northern Germany sat down at her computer to tune into the sunset over the North Sea. Tune in? Yes, she was watching via a tourist webcam that overlooks the sea in the town of St. Peter-Ording, Germany.

While she was watching, she noticed periodic flashes of light from the ice. Turns out they were from a man’s camera. He was using it as a sort of S.O.S. beacon after wandering out onto the ice to photograph the sunset. But he quickly became disoriented, unsure how to get back to shore.

From hundreds of kilometers a way, the woman contacted police, who located the man’s signals and guided him into shore by flashing their car lights.

At the time the man lost his bearings, the air temperature was below freezing. He could have frozen to death or fallen through the ice, added police spokeswoman Kristin Stielow.

Stielow said locals are well aware of the risk of disorientation as darkness falls and the beach becomes hard to identify, but vivid sunsets over frozen landscapes often draw people away from the shore.

You can view the St. Peter-Ording webcam here, though the attention from this news story seems to have crippled the site. So bookmark it and check it out in a couple of days. Or check out some of the St. Peter-Ording pics from Flickr below.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

Vote for Yahoo! Messenger in the About.com IM Awards

February 1, 2010 on 9:51 am | In 10 version, Mac version | 424 Comments

About.com’s annual Reader’s Choice Awards are here and we’ve been nominated for a few awards in the Best IM category:

- Best IM Feature: video calls | vote
- Best Mac IM | vote
- Best IM chat rooms | vote

The winners are determined by you, the readers, so head over to About.com to vote for Yahoo! Messenger in the above categories. Voting begins today and runs through February 25.

Thanks to About.com readers for nominating us. We appreciate it!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

The iPad is coming. What’s your take?

January 27, 2010 on 2:53 pm | In iphone | 13 Comments

Unless you’ve been hiding under an analog rock today, you’ve come across the news about Apple’s new iPad device, due to hit stores in a couple of months.

The iPad is essentially a giant iPhone – 9.7-inch display, half-inch thick, and weighing in at just a pound and a half. It runs the iPhone OS on it so all the same apps you use on your iPhone, like Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone, will be available for the iPad. And several of the native apps like Mail and Calendar have been redesigned for the larger screen.

Read more about the iPad at Yahoo! Tech

One feature that’s missing: a built-in camera. Even the iPhone has one. I was envisioning video calls on the iPad or being able to broadcast live video from it. Perhaps Apple will add one in a future release but some are wondering, could no camera be an iPad killer?

Do you plan to buy an iPad when it comes out? Take the poll below or leave a comment.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

Talking tech with high school students

January 22, 2010 on 3:27 pm | In 10 version | 7 Comments

I had the pleasure of demo’ing Yahoo! Messenger 10 to some high school students that stopped by Yahoo! yesterday.

After a personal welcome from Yahoo! co-founder David Filo, they got a Yahoo! campus tour, drank in our free coffee and soda, and met with other product managers from Mail, Connected TV, Mobile, the Yahoo! homepage, and our Privacy/Policy team.

They were all enrolled in a tech-related class in their high schools, so they had a lot of great questions about Yahoo! Messenger and internet communications in general.

Of course I worried that I would seem old to them. So I switched my desktop wallpaper to Lady Gaga, queued up Rihanna on the Yahoo! Music Player plug-in, and played the Kei$ha “Tik Tok” video when I demo’d our inline media player feature. I’m sure they saw right through me…

There was talk about Facebook, but hardly any about Twitter. They wanted to know when we’d have video calling for groups of friends, and they wanted to know when people would be able to chat with whomever they wanted on IM, instead of just friends on their same network. That was a great segue for me to talk about our partnership with Windows Live Messenger. Hopefully we’ll open up to more networks in the future.

Despite the reputation of teens being totally uninhibited online, I found this group of students thoughtful and cautious about their online usage.

On a funny note, they asked if we would hire someone if they revealed they didn’t have a MySpace page or weren’t on Facebook. I said that’s ok because when I first interviewed at Yahoo!, I had an AOL email address.

Special thanks to the students for checking out Messenger 10 and for asking great questions. I have a feeling that some years from now, I’ll be managing new products that they come up with.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager