A Hack Day full of Messenger ideas
November 1, 2007 on 12:38 pm | In News |
Recently, Yahoo! held its quarterly “Hack Day” at our Sunnyvale, CA headquarters. At Hack Days, Yahoos from different areas of the company come together to display their ideas for product innovations. Sometimes they are completely new product ideas, other times they are extensions of an existing product.
This time around, there were several inspiring hacks that made use of Yahoo! Messenger, particularly our web version. These hacks aren’t available to the public, but I like to share ideas like this on the blog to give you a peek into the creative side of our Yahoo! developers.
Webcam in Yahoo! Messenger for the Web
Our web version of Yahoo! Messenger is lighter on features that our full version, and webcam support is one of the most frequent feature requests we receive. Two developers from our web team, Tie Zhong and Jonathan New, developed a hack that enables flash-based webcam video within Yahoo! Messenger for the Web (screenshot). No extra software or download needed. Hopefully we’ll see this soon in the real Yahoo! Messenger for the Web.
Polyglot: Translating your IMs in real-time
Have you ever found yourself struggling to make your IMs understood to someone who doesn’t speak your same language? Allen Rabinovich’s award-winning hack, “Polyglot”, could help. This hacked version of Yahoo! Messenger for the Web includes menus near the text box that let you choose a language that your IM should be translated into. Talking to someone who speaks Spanish? Type your English IM into the text box, choose “Spanish” from the menu and click send. You’ll see your message appear in the conversation, translated instantly into Spanish. Polyglot works by leveraging the free language translations tools at http://babelfish.altavista.com/. There’s a rumor that a Polyglot-enhanced Web Messenger might be available soon to play around with…I’ll keep you posted.
Yahoo! Answers friend
Hackers Rex Lam, Ahmed El-Helw, and David Arvan developed a new kind of Yahoo! Messenger friend that could easily be called a “know-it-all”. Their Yahoo! Answers bot for Messenger lets you send questions to it (How do I make a tuna melt sandwich?), and sends you back an answer provided by another user on Yahoo! Answers. Leave off the question mark and your answers come as matching links from del.icio.us (screenshot).
Thanks to all the Hack Day developers for sharing their ideas with us.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
Home come hacks always seem to be the coolest additions but never actually make it to the final product?
Like even 9.0 has done away with the Tabbed IM
Comment by Dermot — November 1, 2007 #
Again it appears the Yahoo team is developing new little toys rather then concentrating on fixing existing problems in messenger and the chat rooms.
So disappointing!!!!!!!
Comment by kssnuggle — November 1, 2007 #
Cool ideas, but why is it always “someday” and “some time in the future”. Why to unpaid Open-Source guys seem to bang this stuff out in no time, but a paid-team of Yahoo employees take months and months? Something flawed there, methinks. Thank god for Pidgin, which actually WORKS on my Vista machine, unlike the official clients.
(sorry for being narky, but patience isn’t unlimited)
Comment by Al — November 1, 2007 #
Is there any hope of integrating Flickr and the normal Yahoo profiles (as in, profiles.yahoo.com/user), like the profiles and Yahoo Photos were? It’s really frustrating not being able to do -anything- with that portion of the profile–not even delete what you’re stuck with!
Comment by Jamie — November 2, 2007 #
I would be curious to know how many things from hack day get implemented. I am sure its alot of fun to work on your own ideas even if its for a day once in a while.
Comment by Sloar — November 2, 2007 #
Yahoo! Messenger was hacked together, I see the relevance of this topic.
Comment by Tommy — November 2, 2007 #
I am sorry I missed the event. I love technology. It is so fun. I wanted every blog, website, etc to have an avitar like IM has but develop stories and adventures so you can lead a virtural life.
Comment by JULIE P — November 2, 2007 #
Please I Suggest a a Voice Chat In The Webmessenger.
Comment by Ne4o — November 2, 2007 #
Yahoo! Answers Bot is a nice idea… Why not enable it as default friend for new members, and enhance “Messenger Support” category on Y! Answers ;o) .oO(do you remember old official bot of older Messenger 4 ?)
Comment by Olivier D. alias ze kat — November 3, 2007 #
[…] the official Yahoo Messenger Blog i read about an improvement of Yahoo WebMessenger. Two developers of the Yahoo Team, developed a […]
Pingback by Yahoo Webmessenger will be improved — November 4, 2007 #
Great ideas but we gonna wait..
Comment by JimmY — November 4, 2007 #
All stuff that already exists on some other chat programs, nothing new for me. Yahoo should take a good look at some other chat programs, they have done some pretty great things especially in the area of security something Yahoo Messenger is truly lacking and far behind in.
Personally I would rather that Yahoo scrap these new to Yahoo ideas and concentrate on the problems that Yahoo Messenger is currently plagued with
Comment by pinkysbrain68 — November 4, 2007 #
Dear Sarah,
We are a group of Open Source Linux users using Ubuntu and its variants.We loe Yahoo. And we are a large group as hell. Sad you ain’t coming up with a version of Yahoo Messenger for Ubuntu..We so much want you to..
It’ll help you too,Yahoo!
Ne-Yawn
Comment by neyawn — November 4, 2007 #
I like the idea of putting a webcam in yahoo messenger for the web it will be awesome for me to see and talk to my relatives in the Philippines!
Please put a webcam in yahoo web messenger!
Thanks
Comment by April — November 4, 2007 #
This is so wonderful. I love Yahoo!
Comment by allanmn — November 5, 2007 #
An excellent feature to add to Yahoo Messenger is the multiconversation pane. All incoming instant messages are integrated into one stream and displayed in the pane. Users can transition to particular conversations by clicking on particular instant messages. A screencast of this feature is at http://www.marengoip.com/videos/mc1t.html (apologies in advance, the demo is not with Yahoo).
Thank-you for your consideration.
Comment by Daryl — November 5, 2007 #
Sad to say, I have to agree with the general consensus here, while finding new ideas is fun, there are some major issues with your 8.1 messenger that should have been fixed long ago, and Once again, you are not communicating with us about these issues…
Comment by Valerie — November 6, 2007 #
The Yahoo! Answers friend would be great…! I’d love it!
Comment by Petru — November 6, 2007 #
[…] For more info on Yahoo! Hack Day, visit the Yahoo! Messenger Blog. […]
Pingback by Hack Day « IMinent Blog — November 7, 2007 #
[…] the most satisfying piece of code I’ve written at Yahoo! Check out Sarah Bacon’s coverage of our hacks at the official Yahoo! Messenger […]
Pingback by Random Brain Dump » Post Topic » Alfred — November 14, 2007 #
The answers bot seams particularly interesting!
Comment by Licht — November 15, 2007 #
I think the answer bot is the best out of all the things. The things for the Web are very useful to me because i can’t download messenger because i am at work at the time so they all de benifit me very well
Comment by Johathen — November 16, 2007 #
Hack Day?
well.. accounts are still being ‘hacked’ on a daily basis.
Comment by Ian — September 5, 2008 #
What would be perfect for Yahoo Messenger is to place tabbed windows upon it. Hide certain non-essential items I.E. Audibles. Who ever uses such? Tabbed IM’s would make the clutter go down and the idea would make more people use it. For now, YIM shall be a fail til this problem is fixed.
Comment by Anonymous — October 24, 2008 #
It would be nice to be able to download the chat history from the web messenger to my pc ( as in the standalone client), and also to integrate the web messenger conversations with the chats in the new version which is integrated with yahoo mail.
And yes, where is the yahoo messenger for linux?
Comment by asad — November 15, 2008 #