The Wacky(B) World of Yahoo! Messenger
March 2, 2007 on 9:00 am | In News | 9 Comments
If you’ve spent time on our blog, you may have come across a mention of a site called WackyB. I was first turned onto it about a year ago when someone on our team said “Have you seen WackyB? It’s an awesome site all about Messenger!”. I couldn’t have said it better myself – it is awesome and as a Yahoo! Messenger user, I think you’ll find it a really fun, useful place to get information, tips and to connect with other users.
WackyB was officially born in 1996 when New Zealander “Bee” set up the http://wackyb.co.nz domain. Bee started by offering general technical tidbits for Yahoo! Messenger and since then, it’s developed into a valuable resource with helpful articles, how-to’s, newsletters, and message board forums that cover many different IM services.
On top of keeping up with all things IM, Bee and fellow WackyB’r Andy have developed several plug-ins and utilities for Yahoo! Messenger. The YEmotePLUS plug-in (149,993 downloads and counting!) gives you access to the full menu of emoticons, including the hidden ones, right in your IM window.
The Spoken Status/Status Alert plug-in gives you total control over the status alerts for your friends. Configure individual sounds not only for each friend but also for each action (Online/Offline/Status Change/New message). I have mine programmed to play a harrowing scream sound when my boss comes online. Ha ha, just kidding boss!
For those of you interested in extra conversation security, check out WackyB’s Off the Record plug-in which allows individual “off the record” messages to be exchanged without having to turn off archiving on either side.
We also recently posted a hack that adds tabs to Yahoo! Messenger 8.1, making it easy to manage multiple conversations in one window. It was created at Yahoo! but was first available for download from WackyB. Plus Andy recently developed an additional utility that irons out most of the bugs.
I hope you’ll spend some time exploring WackyB and save it as a favorite site. Thanks to Bee, Andy and the community at WackyB for all their creativity, passion and excitement for Yahoo! Messenger.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
