March 11, 2008 on 7:58 am | In News | 79 Comments
As Yahoo! Messenger gets older (we’re up to version 9.0 now!), so too do some of the “vintage” versions that are still in use by a few people. In an effort to provide the best experience for our users and maintain high security standards, we will officially retire Yahoo! Messenger 5.5 and 5.6 on April 2, 2008. This means that if you are currently using one of those versions, you will no longer be able to sign in and use it after April 1.
If you are a 5.5 or 5.6 user, you have two options for continuing to use Yahoo! Messenger:
Option 1: Download the latest version for Windows
You can use Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 (info | download) or try the new Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta (info | download). Both offer enhanced security as well as better protection from spam. Plus, you’ll be able to use more advanced features like voice calling, SMS, as well as the ability to add and IM with friends that use Windows Live Messenger.
Option 2: Use Yahoo! Messenger for the Web
If you can’t download and install one of the latest versions mentioned above, you can always sign in to Yahoo! Messenger for the Web from your web browser. No extra download or installation is required. With our web version, you can send IM’s as well as SMS text messages to your friend’s mobile phones for free. Our web version also includes anywhere archiving, allowing you to access your message history from any browser. Try it now at http://webmessenger.yahoo.com.
And most importantly, when you transition to one of the newer versions of Yahoo! Messenger, your friends list will stay with you. For more information on the retirement of Yahoo! Messenger 5.5 and 5.6, please visit http://messenger.yahoo.com/eol.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
March 6, 2008 on 9:00 pm | In Vista version | 23 Comments
This week, our Yahoo! Messenger for Vista team is at the Microsoft MIX conference in Las Vegas (March 5-7). The MIX conference is a chance for developers utilizing Microsoft platforms to discuss new ideas and technologies, as well as share what they’ve created. Last year our team hosted a couple of sessions on Windows Presentation Foundation and its integration with Yahoo! Messenger for Vista.
Great work is continuing on Yahoo! Messenger for Vista, and members of the team will be meeting with reporters and technologists at MIX to give them a preview of what’s coming up in the next Beta release. We wanted to make sure our readers and users got a sneak peek as well.
The key feature in the next Beta release will be voice, allowing users to make free PC-to-PC calls and low-cost PC-to-Phone calls right from their PC. And if you have a Phone In number, you will also be able to receive calls from your friends in Yahoo! Messenger for Vista.
As part of the voice feature, our designers have been working on some cool voice visualizations for the product that leverage the WPF 3D integration. So even if you’re not having a very interesting phone conversation, we guarantee you’ll be mesmerized by the awesome effects. 
SMS (short message service) will also be part of this next release, allowing users to send text messages from Yahoo! Messenger for Vista to a friend’s mobile phone for free. We will also be adding Yahoo! Mail alerts to this next version due to the large amount of feedback we received from preview users. Yes, your feedback does make a difference!
While we don’t have a definitive release date for this next Beta version of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista, we’ll keep you posted here on the blog. In the meantime, if you are running Windows Vista, please download and try out the preview version available at http://messenger.yahoo.com/vista. Visit our feedback form anytime to tell us what you like and don’t like about your experience. If you’d like to receive additional updates via email, please join the free Yahoo! Messenger for Vista group.
Josh Jacobson
Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Messenger for Vista
P.S. – If you’re interested in any of the sessions taking place at MIX, you can view them 24 hours after they happen at http://sessions.visitmix.com/.
March 4, 2008 on 1:13 pm | In Events, Fun Stuff | 12 Comments
Back in September 2007, we told you about a celebration at Carnegie Mellon University that honored the Emoticon. Twenty five years earlier, Professor Scott Fahlman was the first to use the text version of the emoticon with his colleagues on a computer message board. To mark the anniversary, Professor Fahlman and his colleagues teamed up with Yahoo! to start an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication, now known as the Smiley Award.
Last week, “One Cold Hand” (http://onecoldhand.com), a website designed to reunite lost gloves with their mates, was named the winner of the inaugural Smiley Award. “One Cold Hand” was created by Jennifer Gooch, a graduate student in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art, and Turadg Aleahmad, a doctoral student in the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) – part of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. They will share the $500 first prize, and their names will be engraved on a plaque kept on permanent display at the university.
Winner Jennifer Gooch said. “A lot of my current work and research looks at how people use technology in order to connect. As a native of Dallas, we didn’t need gloves very often. When I moved [to Pittsburgh, PA] I noticed them everywhere, lying on the ground lonely and useless. I thought a site to reunite gloves — a dating site for gloves, as it were — would be an interesting metaphor for our attempt to find what’s missing.”
A Smiley Award honorable mention went to “Moodjam” created by doctoral student Ian Li. Moodjam is an online diary that allows people to express their moods and feelings using patterns of color. Another honorable mention went to “Buxfer” (http://www.buxfer.com), a free, Web-based application that allows its users to easily keep track of shared expenses, which is handy for roommates, student social groups and many others. Buxfer was created by computer science doctoral students Ashwin Bharambe, Amit Manjhi and Shashank Pandit.
The winning student projects were chosen by a panel of faculty and student judges at Carnegie Mellon and Yahoo! joined in the celebration held on campus last week (see pics here).
Congratulations to “One Cold Hand” for winning the first Smiley Award! We look forward to seeing even more innovation inspired by Smiley in the coming years.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
Here are some photos of the Smiley Award party, held last week at Carnegie Mellon University (photos courtesy of Ralf Brown):
View a larger slideshow
« Previous Page
