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That’s Amore

February 12, 2007 on 9:11 am | In Fun Stuff | 19 Comments

With Valentine’s Day just a couple of days away, I want to share a Messenger love story that hit our inbox recently. And I’ll show you some ways you can use Messenger to share the love.

This love story begins in the Yahoo! chat room “Books and Literature.” Autumn wandered in one evening, hoping to relieve her boredom but also looking for a social outlet, since her role as a single mom didn’t give her much chance to get out. After a couple of weeks of chatting, Autumn loved her new chat home and the people in it. “These friends have talked me off a hundred ledges, made me laugh, and everything else that friends are supposed to do.”

One day, Autumn came across a new chatter, Joseph. They struck up a friendship, which developed into a crush, which then developed into a face-to-face meeting months later. Within days of their meeting, Autumn and Joseph moved in together and then married a month later.

Autumn writes “I’m coming up on my first anniversary with the man of my dreams, who I accidentally met in a chat room and forged a relationship with over the cyber-waves, and I NEVER would have met him without Yahoo Chat. So, I say thanks! You’ve changed my life in a HUGE way.”

We love these romantic stories, and we’re thrilled Yahoo! helped bring Autumn and Joseph together. She calls Joseph “the best mistake I ever made.” Awww…

Feeling inspired? Here are a few ways you can use Messenger to show your love:

 Falling Hearts IMVironment: Shower your IM buddy with love and hit the Buzz button (ctrl+g) to send a big smooch. Try it now

 Flirt with audibles: Whether you’re summoning the courage to declare your love or just want to make sure your sweetie knows, send a flirtatious audible. Try it now

 Loving emoticons: Sprinkle your IM’s with these favorites:   :x     :-*     =P~     ;;))

Call to say “I love you”: Call the one you love with Messenger. If your sweetie is also on Messenger, the call is free. Or use Phone Out to call regular and mobile phones worldwide for as low as 1¢ a minute.

 Share your favorite love song: While on a PC call, use the soundtrack feature in Sound Effects to upload a song that plays in the background of your call. Barry White anyone?

 Dress it up: Change your Avatar into some love-inspired gear.

Share the love! xoxo,

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

19 Comments »

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  1. Why don’t you fix these things before telling stories:

    1) “You cannot ignore yourself” in messenger, when a user floods a chat room, repeatedly appearing.

    2) Language filter setting always default as on, and you have to click it on and off to actually turn it off.

    3) Voice Chat taking the mute off soundcard.

    4) Chat loads in background without putting icon on taskbar – making it look like chat didn’t load.

    5) Graphical problems with userlist, text vanishes, or doesn’t refresh.

    6) Adverts causing scripting errors.

    7) Servers taking forever to accept connection.

    8) Font resetting in chat room

    9) Unresponsive Yahoo! support email address.

    10) Other chatters appearing as having signed on or off, that you have never heard of – breach of privacy.

    Comment by Sean — February 12, 2007 #

  2. How about telling users why voice chat doesn’t work in vista too. Instead of making it look like it’s fully compatible.

    Comment by Sean — February 12, 2007 #

  3. The problems that Sean has listed do indeed exist and are quite annoying. Many Messenger users (former) are resorting to third party clients because of all the issues and mistakes on the dev team’s part with Messenger’s ever-evolving development. Ironically, this isn’t what you (Yahoo!) wanted here and you, in the past, had taken some measures to prevent against/hinder third party client development.

    I think it would be in your best interest to create a “Bugs” blog and resolve at least some of these ongoing issues for Yahoo! chatters. If you truly want to battle against the other IM service providers and their client offerings then listening to feedback (in the form of constructive criticism and bug reports) is a good start to do that. Being a third party developer around Yahoo!’s chat services (collectively), you could say I have a pretty good idea how many bugs still exist in not only your chat server software but in the Messenger client itself.

    Sean, whether or not Yahoo! ever plans to resolve these annoyances is up in the air but I can tell you that we (the YTK team) have already resolved some of them for chatters:

    1) YTK Lite (Free) and YTK Pro (pay-for) fixes this issue completely.

    2) Open filter1.enc in notepad or wordpad (any text editor), select all the contents and delete them then save the file. If there’s nothing contained in the filter file then nothing can be filtered in chat rooms.

    3) Wasn’t aware of this one actually.

    4) I’ve noticed this one before.

    5) YTK Lite and YTK Pro fix this issue by giving you a “Refresh User List” option from the top menu in chat.

    6) You can ‘optionally’ remove all ads in Messenger in both YTK Lite and YTK Pro. If there’s no ads loaded there’s a lesser chance of a script error occurring.

    7) I think everybody and their brother’s noticed this one…

    8) Annoying.

    9) Never tried e-mailing it.

    10) Both YTK Lite and YTK Pro fix this issue.

    Another update to YTK Lite is on the way to fix some minor bugs and add in new features.

    Comment by Adam [Torseq Technologies] — February 13, 2007 #

  4. Hi,

    I know this is a “messenger” blog, but sometimes I hear about messenger related stuff in other places, e.g. integration of messenger in mail beta.
    See – http://updates.mail.yahoo.com/blog/archives/date/2007/02/

    Is it possible that you also have some kind of :
    http://updates.MESSENGER.yahoo.com ?

    Monitoring Y! messenger changes and updates is part of my job, and I find it very difficult to do, compared to other products.

    Anybody listens ?

    10x.

    Comment by Nick — February 13, 2007 #

  5. Nick – coming soon!

    Sarah Bacon

    Comment by Administrator — February 13, 2007 #

  6. An alert to an entity using bogus Yahoo Credentials:

    Please investigate the following screen name:

    a.18donna4cam29

    And its variants, as it uses bogus Yahoo Credentials to lure users into clicking on its links. And it has used other identities with the same message urging users to click on links it provides using fictitious Yahoo Credentials.

    This entity can be found in the room “Playstation 1″ and has remained active for two full weeks in that chatroom, non-stop, with no intervention on behalf of your company.

    Also, please be aware that the dialogue being exchanged within your chatrooms is being logged as a testament to the failure of the chat service providers themselves, as a whole, to govern their own goings on.

    These facts may or may not be made available to the powers that be in very short order if safeguards are not enacted post haste to protect your subscribers, as well as your basic users, to protect said users from the dangers that your company allows to proliferate on a world – wide basis.

    You must take action.

    Comment by chatter — February 13, 2007 #

  7. Well, I am not here to provide another complaint like what other users have posted about. I thought I would take this time to wish all YIM developer’s and team a Happy Valentine’s Day :-)

    Cheers,
    Dreamchaser

    Comment by Dreamchaser — February 13, 2007 #

  8. So why doesn’t anybody comment on the story rather than complaining about things. You take a good story like this and just say,”Hey I am a doofus and I have problems so here.” Believe it or not. No one cares about your problems. And this is a great story. Keep it up.

    Comment by Shaun — February 16, 2007 #

  9. Just wanted to say hey to all. Hope you are having a happy, blessed day.

    Comment by Boop10924 — February 17, 2007 #

  10. Um…I know it’s ridiculous to comment on a story written about me, but I just wanted to say thanks to Sarah for publishing our story. And thank God for chatrooms, even if they do have their technical difficulties now and then. Shout-outs to anyone who is a “reg” in Books & Lit 2!!! We miss you guys!

    Comment by Autumn — February 19, 2007 #

  11. i just wanted to say how great it was to see others meeting thru yahoo…i had profiles up on various ‘dating site’ for months and attracted some real ‘winners’ and then one day about 3 years ago i got an instant message from a guy by the screen name tinindian1965…he was interested in my profile and my interest of nudist resorts…he had not met anyone from the area who had any knowlege of them but was very interested himself…so we started chatting and found that we had quite a few things in common…we met and for me it was love at first “type” we have been together for 3 years and engaged for a year and a half now…yeah it went from innocent ims here and there and 3 years late ri am engaged, own a house together, and looking forward to spending the rest of our lives together…who would have thought…

    Comment by amythestm — February 19, 2007 #

  12. That’s awesome, AMYTHESTM! Actually, the Books and Literature 2 Room that Joey and I met in seems to be somewhat of a “breeding ground” (pardon the pun) for couples meeting. I know some other couples from there also. Congrats to you and your fella!

    Comment by Autumn — February 20, 2007 #

  13. Thanks for sharing amythestm! Congrats,

    Sarah Bacon

    Comment by Administrator — February 20, 2007 #

  14. I deleted yahoo folder in c:/program files while troubleshooting my yahoo messenger. When I reinstall yahoo messenger, I could no longer use audibles and IMvironments. Silly me! Could you please let me know how to bring these two features back to my messenger? Thanks..

    Comment by Raras — April 6, 2007 #

  15. Hi Raras,

    The simplest solution would be to completely uninstall Messenger through the Add/Remove Programs control panel. Then go to the Messenger website at http://messenger.yahoo.com and re-download and install.

    Sarah Bacon

    Comment by Administrator — April 6, 2007 #

  16. Thanks for the quick reply, Sarah. I’ve redownloaded and reinstalled YM many times but the audibles and IMvironments would not appear. I mean, the buttons are there, but when I click audibles button, the box is empty. And the IMvironments…when I click ‘autumn leaves’ for example, this appears on my screen: ‘Unable to load the “” IMVironment. The IMVironment server is unavailable.’

    Comment by Raras — April 7, 2007 #

  17. So, Sarah, my Yahooligan friends on Facebook who used to share the chatroom with me have asked me to see if there is any hopeof Yahoo bringing back user-created chatrooms, since many other servers allow it (like Facebook chats, for instance).

    Comment by Autumn Conley — April 10, 2008 #

  18. [...] mikeanthony69– sure thing! Check out some of the love stories from other Messenger users here: http://www.ymessengerblog.com/blog/2007/02/12/thats-amore/ Be sure to let us know how it [...]

    Pingback by Can i use yahoo messenger to date someone? | Y!M Lover — August 26, 2008 #

  19. Hey Fibs! I read this, along with the piece you wrote! Way to go!

    Comment by Bitch — April 14, 2009 #

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