A Brave New Avatar World
January 29, 2007 on 3:41 pm | In Avatars |
I don’t know about you, but I think IM’ing in a box all the time can start to get dull. So I recently loaded the new Avatar World plug-in to spice things up. Now I chat Avatar-to-Avatar with my friends in rooms with fun backgrounds, swap files using our Avatar World suitcases, and there are secret words I’ve discovered that add unexpected fun to my chats (hint: try typing “toddler” or “bbq” while you’re in a room).
If you do venture into Avatar World, be prepared to change your attire often to match your room (beachwear is a must). Customize further with commands like “decorate ferrari” which inserts a matching photo of a Ferrari car from Yahoo! Image Search into your room. Just replace ferrari with another item you want to put in your world.
For those of you interested in the technical details, Avatar World was created by Xavier Legros, Kai Arnold and Justin Willow on our platforms team (and even some debugging on my laptop). This plug-in leverages the powerful feature set of the Yahoo! Messenger SDK to offer features like file sharing and conferencing. To offer the floating user interface of Avatar World, the team used Win32 API’s to create transparent windows that host flash controls and in certain cases Internet Explorer controls to host HTML and JavaScript. Special thanks to Amanda Walker for creating the cool flash animations (those secret keywords…) and Matt Au for developing the original idea.
Give Avatar World a try and invite friends to your room for a group chat. Then let us know what you think of it here on the blog or in the Avatar World group. I’m off to find some new Avatar accessories…
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
P.S. – If you figure out any more of the secret words, let me know!
I’m really enjoying reading news and updates for the Windows version
:-s
Comment by Lucky — January 29, 2007 #
Ever since the java version of chat been removed the chat rooms,
ChatterBox,
ShowBiz Central,
and The Press Box
under the Voice Chat category don’t work.
A messege pops up saying “Chat Error: Create Room”
I am not trying to create a room, since they are in the list of chat rooms!
Comment by Chris — January 29, 2007 #
I agree with Chris the ChatterBox chat room should be fixed. It used to be my favorite chat room.
Comment by Heather — January 29, 2007 #
thank you for making the chatrooms NON java
the chat rooms with voice work fine for me now
Comment by catherine — January 30, 2007 #
Hey,
I just came across this blog. Good that you have a blog and allow comments.
Tell Yahoo! mail blog people to allow comments because I need to advice them regarding a lot of things and I am tired of sending feedbacks.
Thanks.
Comment by Jt — January 30, 2007 #
Please remove the booters and bots from the chat rooms. I hate them.
Comment by Jt — January 30, 2007 #
Great, but what good are all the bells and whsitles if you can’t log on. I don’t know what you guys are doing but yahoo is working slower than ever. This wouldn’t be the first time I unistalled my yahoo messanger, you guys need to get it together over there
Comment by steve — January 30, 2007 #
@ Jt, the only way to fix the booters and bots is, patching all the chat exploits (infact, making it where ‘boot code’ packets aren’t received by users you ignore/not on buddy list/etc.), and changing the YMSG protocol significantly so bot makers can’t log in their bots (making sure they can’t just change the version number on the DLL to ‘trick’ the Yahoo servers).
Comment by Venom — January 30, 2007 #
Hey… have you noticed that when you type devil and god in a messenger chat, devil gets underlined so you can search it with Y! search but god doesn’t?
Comment by Darius — January 30, 2007 #
Oh, and here’s something intresting I made with Yahoo! Messenger http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJvA5S76ywo
A new concept I invented. You should gimme an award.
Comment by Darius — January 30, 2007 #
Hey Darius - that’s awesome! Very clever. I really enjoyed it.
Sarah Bacon
Comment by Administrator — January 30, 2007 #
thanx for making chat rooms non java
Comment by jrd — January 31, 2007 #
Look what I found on the internet, a website with magic avatars for Yahoo Messenger! http://twopics.com/
Comment by Hey — January 31, 2007 #
lmao that concert thing was funny, now i wana see some make a rap video out of the emotions too
Comment by matt — January 31, 2007 #
Darius (http://jeg.stuffo.info) has two brand new emoticoncerts:
Emoticoncert nr. 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rKfFEiHZ1g
Emoticoncert nr. 3 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un7Roodwd0M
This kid is really something
Comment by Denisa — February 3, 2007 #
Darius, the inventor of the Emoticoncert term, is now all over the news in Romania.
P.S. How come your blog doesn’t display the Yahoo emoticons?
Comment by Denisa — February 6, 2007 #
i love this new avatar world it helps me have lots of friends
Comment by michael — February 12, 2007 #
This is pretty good!
Comment by Dog Clothing — September 28, 2007 #
[…] Encore plus étrange, ils ont aussi développé une extension du tout nouveau Yahoo! Messenger qui permet justement d’exploiter non seulement cet Avatar Towns mais bien plus encore : Yahoo! Avatar World Plug-in (plus d’infos ici : A Brave New Avatar World). […]
Pingback by Virtual Paris 2007 » Yahoo! se lance timidement sur le créneau des univers virtuels — April 11, 2008 #
Ummm… with the video screen… How does that work? and the desktop folder “mon dossier” I don’t have one…
Comment by kmit09 — April 24, 2008 #
hehe, I’ve just found a secret keyword: “angel”. Try it ^^
Comment by instant_noodles — June 28, 2008 #
@kmit09: I think it’s “Add file”, I choose it and copy-paste the file. It works but takes time.
Cheers!
Comment by instant_noodles — June 28, 2008 #