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Hacking Away at Yahoo! Messenger

January 24, 2007 on 11:11 am | In Fun Stuff | 20 Comments

Every few months, we have Hack Day here at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. Employees are challenged to create unique products or features using Yahoo! products.

Most Hack Day creations are not available to the public, but we thought you’d enjoy seeing how we got creative with Yahoo! Messenger at the last Hack Day:

Emoticon Shortcuts
Apart from the basics like and , emoticon shortcuts can be hard to type. David Cortright, an interaction designer, created a program that enables mnemonic shortcuts for emoticons. Rather than typing to send in your IM, just type “!party”, which will instantly transform into the actual text string (helpful with hidden emoticons). Lucky for you, Emoticon Shortcuts is available for download.

Flickr Alerts
If you’re a Flickr addict like Yahoo! engineer Allen Tom, you’ll love this tool that alerts you when new photos are added to a Flickr group.

Allen frequents the Flickr group “Guess Where SF“, where users upload hard-to-identify pics from around San Francisco. The first to identify a photo gets bragging rights, so Allen likes to know right away when new photos arrive. With his hack, Allen gets a pop-up window in Yahoo! Messenger that shows the latest additions to the group, so he can jump in and start IDing the pics. Go get ‘em, Allen!

Map’im
Plug-in master John Dunning created this hack to bring the power of Yahoo! Maps to Messenger. It’s really useful if, like me, you have lots of street addresses in your Yahoo! Address Book.

Click a contact in your list and the Map’im plug-in displays the contact’s map location. The map marker remains, so if you select a number of contacts, you can zoom out and see where they live in relation to each other. Map’im is available now, plus check out other handy plug-ins created by John.

Feeling inspired? If you’re a developer — or just play one on TV — check out the Software Development Kit (SDK) for Yahoo! Messenger plug-ins. You might just create the next great plug-in that millions will enjoy. Happy hacking!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

20 Comments »

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  1. [...] My second career as a hand model has been exposed, by a blog post from the guys behind Yahoo! Messenger. BTW, I have even more stickers now, including one of those Flickr stickrs seen in the shot. -m [...]

    Pingback by Push Button Paradise | Blog Archive | My computer is famous — January 24, 2007 #

  2. I couldnt find a link to the “Flickr Alerts.” Is it available for download?

    Comment by Dan Kearns — January 26, 2007 #

  3. Hi Dan – “Flickr alerts” is not yet available. Thanks,

    Sarah B.

    Comment by Administrator — January 26, 2007 #

  4. Is there a plugin available for yahoo messenger that will enable me to control Windows Media Player functions, Play, Stop, Next, Previous ? The Plugin should also have the ability to automatically change my Status according to the name of the song that I am currently playing on Windows Media Player.

    Comment by Goutam Nath — January 27, 2007 #

  5. how about hacking away and making a chatroom program that actually works?

    Comment by mike — January 27, 2007 #

  6. Thank’s for my yahoo give me a chance become member of yahoo mesenger

    Comment by KO KANG TSIANG — January 30, 2007 #

  7. for the past week i dont know what you changed but when we are chatting and start to share pic’s all of a sudden she cant see my messages i can see her’s but she dosent get mine what have you done to the sharing pic’s or chat messenger what do we need to do to fix it

    Comment by marcia — February 1, 2007 #

  8. I have an idea for your chatrooms. To get rid of all the cam whores, how about charging extra (monthly) for people to use their webcams?

    Comment by D Okon — February 2, 2007 #

  9. Maybe some of your techs could figure out why it takes my 15 mins to log onto chat??? just a suggestion because you guys suck…

    Comment by steve — February 3, 2007 #

  10. some time yahoo dont sign in due to weak net connection and it signs in status FIREWLL WITH NO PROXIES which disable the web cam ,,, so plz do something to it so that the cam also works in FIREWALL WITH NO PROXY setting too,,,any way yahoo has made life easy thanks for the provisions

    Comment by jaan — February 4, 2007 #

  11. hey, when are you guys going to do something about the giant screen for Messenger??? It doesn’t fit in my 15″ monitor!!! Blogs are fine, but why not concentrate on doing something that actually helps the poor suckers who have Messenger!! Also, the last couple days, my Yahoo main page and my Messenger don’t want to come on — can’t get my Flickr photo frame on Widgets and half the time, the Weather

    Comment by Barb Harvey — February 5, 2007 #

  12. now i remember why i dumped the messenger software last year. damnit yahoo! my webcam used to work flawlessly in chat and messenger. but ever since the “lets make this piece of crap look like xpsp2 style.” well…what have we got now? two absolute pieces of crap. been with yahoo since it was about 3 months old, seen alot of good develop, jacked the web community with the notion of “Free” but call a beta ver a beta and spoon feed it to the geeks, but get this crap outa the mainstream till it works! with my last breath. i hack a loogie on the latest messenger ver.

    Comment by shredex — February 6, 2007 #

  13. [...] Another Hack Day took place this week here at Yahoo!. Messenger engineers Ryan Doherty and Jonathan New decided to make a hack for our very own blog. They developed a WordPress plug-in that makes it possible to use all the Yahoo! Messenger emoticons on our blog (even the hidden ones). Thanks Ryan and Jon!   [...]

    Pingback by Yahoo! Messenger Blog » Say hi to the real emoticons — March 28, 2007 #

  14. WOW how useful im really really glad so inovative im being sarcastic btw… why can you not fix the join chat issue people are having and spam then i would be impressed untill then no it just make you look even more retarded :l

    Comment by Blah — March 28, 2007 #

  15. YAHOO internal developers,
    Why are you so unable to make the case to management that the chat services are seriously broken.

    If you care so less of the quality of the service how can you expect others to be enthusiastic of the developer SDKs.

    Comment by deepthawt — March 31, 2007 #

  16. thought mabe since you were doing so much for messenger you would help try to do something about the ordering of prints. mine have been ordered for 3 weeks, and i keep getting the runaround. and no one answeres the phone, or they put you on hold, and thats it…..guess im too worn out to care. is that what they want? they still take your money………darn

    Comment by caroline — April 4, 2007 #

  17. [...] What do felt, RFID chips and velcro have in common with Yahoo! Messenger? Meet Shumbee, the latest addition to our family. Shumbee made his debut at Hack Day last week where Messenger team members Mike Holzer, Brian Kobashikawa and Karl Adam presented their invention. [...]

    Pingback by Yahoo! Messenger Blog » The World According to Shumbee — April 6, 2007 #

  18. Welcome to Att, people it’s been downhill ever since

    Comment by astrospacerich — April 14, 2007 #

  19. I have download Yahoo IM.
    I can not get my IM to sign in nor do my IM contact list show

    Comment by Marilyn — April 27, 2007 #

  20. popular free ringtones

    http://www.thehotstop.info

    signature…

    Comment by freeeeringtones — August 17, 2007 #

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