May 29, 2007 on 9:45 am | In News | 5 Comments
Kensington recently released their Vo200 Bluetooth Internet Phone, a handy little voice-over-IP (VOIP) phone that’s great for laptop users. It works with most major online internet phone providers, including Yahoo! Voice.
Shaped flat and sized like a credit card, the Kensington Vo200 fits into a laptop’s type I or II PC card slot for storage and recharging. A two-way swivel flap doubles as a mouthpiece and a speakerphone. And because the phone uses a Bluetooth connection, you can talk at distances of up to 30 feet away from your laptop. Use Yahoo! Messenger on your PC to make a call, then pop out the Kensington Vo200 handset and roam freely while you talk.
PC World rated the phone an 82 out of 100 (very good), saying “incoming audio was surprisingly clear” and “I got the 30 hours [standby battery life] and at least 2.5 hours of talk time before recharges were necessary”. Read the complete review at PCWorld.com or head over to Yahoo! Shopping to compare prices at several retailers.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
May 25, 2007 on 12:24 pm | In News | 376 Comments
If you are a reader of this blog, you will know that our vocal supporters of Yahoo! Messenger’s chat rooms are frustrated. It is completely understandable.
Though Yahoo! is a big company with over 10,000 employees around the world, a very small number of them work on our chat rooms; in fact you can count them on one hand.
Some of the most frequent complaints are about the instability of chat rooms, the annoying bots, and the lack of chat rooms in the Mac version. This summer, we will introduce improvements that address these issues. Here’s how:
Stability: For the past year, we have worked on rebuilding the entire back end of the chat room system. The original chat room servers are over seven years old, fossils in the world of the internet. They have been re-written from the ground up and are already running in “alpha” mode in our data centers. They will be rolled out to our everyday chat rooms users in the next month. This will greatly improve the speed and stability of chat rooms in the short term. In the long term, it will enable us to continue improving our chat rooms more quickly and efficiently.
Bots: In the next few weeks, we will begin rolling out new security measures to distinguish the humans from the machines. Humans are welcome, machines are not. The result will be a dramatic decrease in the number of “bots” that are spoiling chat rooms.
Mac chat rooms: We are already beta testing a new version of Messenger for Mac that includes, among its many improvements, native support for chat rooms. Yes you read it correctly, native support for Mac chat rooms! Client software is tricky, of course, and sometimes the “bug fixing” takes longer than we anticipate. But we believe it is more important to have a delay and get it right, than to rush and make a mistake. Like the chat rooms team, the Mac team is a small one, but they make up for it with their talents.
As a Mac user myself, I am very glad that we continue to actively support such a great platform as the Mac OS. We appreciate your patience while we get this next version ready.
We know you have been living a long time with the less-than-stellar state of Yahoo! chat rooms. We appreciate your patience as these improvements become available.
Aside from chat rooms, we are also hard at work on a number of great new things from the Yahoo! Messenger team. Millions of you are already enjoying our recently released Yahoo! Messenger for the Web (http://web.im). There is a lot more great stuff coming, so hold on tight.
Jeff Bonforte
Vice President
Yahoo! Messenger
May 24, 2007 on 8:41 am | In News | 21 Comments
We’d like to know more about why and how you use emoticons. Take this brief online survey:
[Survey now closed. Thank you for your responses!]
We’ll share results here on the blog once the project is complete. Thanks!
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
May 22, 2007 on 3:13 pm | In News | 17 Comments
If you have a website or blog, you can provide an easy way for your visitors to get in touch with you over Yahoo! Messenger. To display an online presence indicator (OPI) badge, all you need to do is drop a little bit of code into your webpage. Then when visitors come to your site, they’ll see a badge displaying your online status, even when you’re signed out of Yahoo! Messenger.
When a visitor clicks on the badge, it starts an instant message with you. If you’re online, you can quickly respond back. Or if it’s a stranger or someone you don’t want to talk to, you can ignore them. Here’s what OPI badges look like, depending on whether you’re on or offline:
It’s important to know that when someone hovers on the OPI badge, they are able to see your Yahoo! ID in the clickable link. So if you’re hesitant about sharing your Yahoo! ID with the world, think twice about using an OPI badge on your public site. But if your site is mostly visited by friends and family, it can be a convenient way for them to quickly contact you.
Click here to get HTML code for an OPI badge
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
May 18, 2007 on 2:41 pm | In News | 242 Comments
During a couple of nights next week, we’ll be performing routine server maintenance. During this time, some Yahoo! Messenger features may be temporarily unavailable and the service may seem a little slow. Planned maintenance times are:
Monday, May 21 at 7pm Pacific time
Tuesday, May 22 at 7pm Pacific time
Free time zone converter
We expect the maintenance to last about 6 hours each night. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience.
Thanks,
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
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