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Pingbox: Expanding your IM world

September 30, 2008 on 10:05 am | In 9.0 version, Pingbox |

With the launch of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 last week, we introduced a new product called Pingbox™. Pingbox is an application that once embedded into your blog, website or social network page, lets site visitors IM you without needing to download or even sign into Yahoo! Messenger.

To get your own Pingbox, go to the Yahoo! Messenger website and click on “Pingbox”. As you create your Pingbox, you can choose a background theme and size, customize the greeting your visitors will see when you’re online or offline, and enter a custom display name for your Pingbox. So even if your real name is Harold, you may choose to name your Pingbox to better match the content on your webpage, profile etc (e.g. Dirty Harry).

Once you’re done creating your Pingbox, click the Next button and you’ll be given the code that you need to copy and paste into your web page. Note that the code can differ slightly across the social networks, so be sure to select a service from the menu before you copy and paste (or just choose “Code only” if you’re putting it into your blog or web page). Even if you don’t see your favorite social network listed, you should try using the “code only” option as it will work on most sites.

Here’s how Pingbox works for you and your visitor during a conversation. Let’s say you put a Pingbox on your MySpace page. When a visitor comes to your page, they’ll see your Pingbox with your custom invitation message. Your visitor can then type a message into the Pingbox and hit “Send” (and include an emoticon if they want). You’ll receive the IM while you’re in Yahoo! Messenger. Depending on whether the visitor gives themselves a nickname or not in the Pingbox, you may or may not know who is contacting you.

You can create up to ten Pingboxes. Create one for each social network you’re on, or create one and put it on many pages. For each Pingbox you create, a new group will appear in your Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 contact list, with the group name matching your Pingbox name. As visitors arrive on your web page, you’ll begin to see contacts appear within that group. And even if a visitor to your site is not IM’ing you, you can IM them and they’ll see the message in Pingbox (assuming they’re paying attention). To send all your visitors to that Pingbox a message, right click on the Pingbox group name in your contact list and choose “Broadcast an IM to these Pingbox visitors”.

If you have a lot of visitors to your page and find you’re getting more IM’s than you can handle, don’t worry! It’s easy to control your Pingbox from Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 and the website. When you’re in Messenger, you can right click on the Pingbox group name in your list and choose “Pingbox is Off”. The Pingbox will still be on your webpage but you’ll appear offline to any visitors. It’s basically the stealth setting for your Pingbox.

For further controls such as editing your Pingbox design or removing it altogether, just visit the Yahoo! Messenger website and click on the “Pingbox” button near the top of the site. You can also get there by right clicking on your Pingbox group in Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 and choosing “Edit” or “Manage my Pingboxes”. Note that deleting a Pingbox will remove it from your webpage without you even having to remove the code you placed there earlier.

You can receive Pingbox IMs while in most versions of Yahoo! Messenger but not when using Yahoo! Messenger in Mail or Yahoo! Messenger applications on your mobile phone. But if you want to be able to see the Pingbox groups and visitors in your contact list, you need to be on the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 (version 9.0.0.912 or later). This means if you’re a Mac user for example, you can still use Pingbox and receive IMs from your site visitors, but you won’t be able to see the visitors appear in your contact list.

So what are you waiting for? Head over to the Pingbox page on our site to create yours. We’ll be adding support for more social networks over time. If there’s a favorite network you’d like to see included, let us know in the comments (we’re working on Facebook already!). And if you want to show off your Pingbox, leave your site address in the comments so we can check it out.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

38 Comments

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  1. Interesting stuff, but indeed, “mind your manners”.

    Comment by MAD — September 30, 2008 #

  2. [...] multe explicatii despre Pingbox Septembrie 30, 2008 Scris de Andrei Baietii de la Yahoo au revenit cu cateva explicatii despre Yahoo Messenger Pingbox. Eu l-am folosit cateva zile destul de intens si m-am lamurit: e [...]

    Pingback by Mai multe explicatii despre Pingbox | Zambesc — September 30, 2008 #

  3. I opened a lot of pages When I did account Pingbox.

    Comment by ady — September 30, 2008 #

  4. Um for some reason my PingBox doesn’t seem to be working on my MySpace page :-s

    Damn!!!

    Comment by x_skitzo_kitty — September 30, 2008 #

  5. It’s all great. Already appreciated it a lot on many places.

    I just wanted to ask you guys if you could track user sessions for individual websites or web pages? Because it seems like a single user could be counted as multiple visitors by the messenger once they enter the site from more than one pages. Keeping in mind, I’m talking about a website that holds a pingbox on more than one of it’s pages.

    Plus, I’m going out of the box here to give you a suggestion to add, if possible, “Chat Conferences” to the PingBox as well. Maybe that could be an advanced PingBox or something. But would be amazing.

    Thanks.

    Comment by Jaunty Mellifluous — September 30, 2008 #

  6. How do you prevent SPAM? How do you prevent some nut-job from dumping a wiki article into into the pingbox and wasting my time? Ideally if I embed it on a authenticated site, I would like to get the user’s name before starting the conversation.

    Comment by Sanjay — September 30, 2008 #

  7. Hi Jaunty -

    To track traffic/visitors on different pages of your site, you’d need to create a Pingbox for each unique location. That way you’d have separate groups in your 9.0 contact list for each Pingbox you’ve embedded. You could have one pingbox for your homepage, one for your “contact us” page etc.

    Sarah Bacon

    Comment by Administrator — September 30, 2008 #

  8. you need to add a arm and a hand so the smiley can drink his coffee right

    Comment by hallo — September 30, 2008 #

  9. Will it let webpages to load slowly and is it light weight. Is there any chance for doin spam.

    Comment by ram — September 30, 2008 #

  10. too bad it wont work on Yahoo Messenger 8

    Comment by Binary — October 1, 2008 #

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  12. @sanjay you can place your pingbox behind a sign-in page if you want to filter who has access to it. I’m excited that site visitors don’t have to be logged into Y! to be able to communicate with it. But maybe that as an optional would be a bonus if others share your concern.

    This is a great tool. It’s fun just to watch when a visitor arrives at my site and what page they’re on. I’ve added this to the sidebar of my Yahoo!-hosted Wordpress blog (see it on any page at blog.beaulaurier.net) and it works flawlessly. I learned about a few options (like right-clicking the group in msgr) I wasn’t even aware of.

    I hope this is a sign of quality and usefulness to come from future Yahoo! releases. It’s much appreciated.

    Comment by Joe B. — October 1, 2008 #

  13. Hi Sarah,

    Thanks for the reply.

    I understand using PingBox the way you explained would enable me to track users. But that’s not what I was actually after.

    What I meant was, lets take a scenario, User 1 enters my site on Page 1. Yahoo! PingBox detects that user and shows him/her online on my Messenger as ‘Viewer 354 came online’.

    Now User 1 jumps from Page 1 on my site to Page 2. What Yahoo! PingBox does then is, which it shouldn’t be doing, it shows “Viewer 355 came online” and simply shows “Viewer 354 went offline” after a while. Even though it was the same user who jumped from Page 1 to Page 2.

    What it should be doing is maintaining an IP Record for whoever visits my website so that it will enable PingBox not to show duplicate entries by a single user on my website.

    Now I understand recording IP Addresses for every PingBox user might not be plausible for you. So that’s fine by me, if it can’t be done.

    Comment by Jaunty Mellifluous — October 2, 2008 #

  14. I tried this pingbox on my website but it’s quite annoying. I mean everybody, anonymously, can contact you and write anything, from random characters to insults. And on a website with a lot of traffic it’s almost impossible to keep the pingbox turned on.
    The good thing to do is to add the options to ignore/block the people who are using the pingbox just to annoy you.

    Comment by Andrei — October 2, 2008 #

  15. I’m posting this from my iPhone so sorry for Any mistakes. It sounds very interesting and I’ll sure embed this on my blog this evening to test it out. Might just be a great new feature. Cheers

    Comment by Geeky — October 3, 2008 #

  16. Andrei,

    Yea, that sounds like a problem. You can keep it to your profile page where only people interested in really contacting you would visit.

    Comment by Jaunty Mellifluous — October 4, 2008 #

  17. In Google Chrome Pingbox makes Shockwave crash. Fix if you can please. Great tool

    Comment by Razvan Girmacea — October 4, 2008 #

  18. I am trying Pingbox on my business blog, but it isn’t working so far. My website is host by Yahoo, but my blog is powered by Blogger and published in my website with the FTP server.

    Even though I am logged into Yahoo! Messenger version 9.0.0.1912 and list myself as available, the Pingbox on my blog shows me as offline and I cannot receive messages.

    Comment by Carl Starrett — October 5, 2008 #

  19. I like it, very use ful, was able create/add/use ymping on http://www.myspace.com / http://www.cpixel.com

    WORKS FLAWLESSLY

    Comment by Chris Cragun — October 5, 2008 #

  20. I’ve already sought help on this matter through the Live Chat feature, but maybe someone else has some ideas, too? (I’m still waiting for a response from someone in Tech Support, so maybe we’ll fix it). When I go to make a Pingbox, it tells me that I don’t have the right setting and need a parent’s permission. It will let me choose colors and whatnot, but I can’t save it and get the code. I looked around, even looked in My Account, I can’t find anything to change this ’setting’. I’ve had my account for 10 years and it’s never been an account other than my own personal one, so I don’t know where these parental settings came from. Any suggestions?

    Comment by Michele — October 6, 2008 #

  21. Does Pingbox work with Facebox at all?

    Comment by star3771gem — October 9, 2008 #

  22. Hi star3771gem - Did you mean Facebook? Pingbox is not yet available for Facebook but we’re working on it. We’ll announce here on the blog when it’s ready.

    Sarah Bacon

    Comment by Administrator — October 9, 2008 #

  23. my pingbox will not work on my myspace. when i preview my page first to see if it works it does then when i save it and go back to my page to view it, its has a huge gray button that says DeAndrea availible alone in a huge white box. there is no pingbox meseenger and/or design. its confusing and im pullling my hair out. PLEASE HELP!!!!

    Comment by deandrea — October 12, 2008 #

  24. hii Yahooooo!!

    I must say.. this is one of the bestest features introduced by you. It looks amazing on my site. And members love it. I really find it very convenient and fun to use.

    Thanks a lot for this. I hope we see more features soon to integrate it further with a site so that logged in member’s username can automatically be filled in the “nickname” field.

    Also this has a compatibility issue with Google Chrome which should be fixed asap.

    Thank you

    Comment by Vinayak Gupta — October 13, 2008 #

  25. Try supporting orkut, and, of course, Facebook. If I send my PingBox code in a scrap, it says some thing like “this rich content code was not posted” Dunno try to help

    Comment by Marc — October 14, 2008 #

  26. Orkut is still in Beta !

    It doesn’t allow rich text like javascript codes in scraps.

    Comment by Vinayak Gupta — October 14, 2008 #

  27. Is not working on TAGGED, its a great feature this way you dnt have to give out your email address!

    wish it would work on TAGGED!

    Comment by Valerie — November 1, 2008 #

  28. any timescale to getting pingbox on facebook?
    cheers

    Comment by Rich — November 9, 2008 #

  29. it is not working on my TAGGED profile

    Comment by aftab hussain — November 9, 2008 #

  30. Why does my pingbox session expire whenever I click the “next” button no matter what? See image url for alert example: http://img.skitch.com/20081111-ptri4i7geuq2d325du2hdpedm4.png

    Comment by htmlnerd — November 10, 2008 #

  31. My pingbox on myspace says that i am offline even when i am online. Help!

    Comment by Stephy G — November 12, 2008 #

  32. Hi,

    I’ve done everything required - signed into YIM v9, signed into Pingbox, put the code on my site.

    But my site always seems to show me as offline, even though my pingbox page shows me as online, and I actually am very much online. I even see the visitors coming and leaving in my IM window, but I can’t chat with anyone, as they all see me as offline when they arrive at my page. Here is the page. What could I be doing wrong?

    http://www.BabyNamesIndia.com/ultimate.html

    Thanks,

    Ravi

    Comment by Ravi Jayagopal — November 20, 2008 #

  33. Hi Good People at Yahoo,

    I’m online right now and just IMed with a friend but my Pingbox is still showing me as offline and it’s quite frustrating. I followed the instructions and could use your help on this.

    Thank you.

    Comment by badthing — November 23, 2008 #

  34. Hey There Yahoooo! I love the idea but like some others here my Pingbox doesn’t display in Firefox. I get a white box only. The Pingbox does display in IE but shows me as offline and doesn’t respond. I’ve tried both kinds of code and several hours tinkering between different sites to no avail.

    It will be great if I ever get it working!

    Thanks Y’all…

    Comment by Cassie — November 23, 2008 #

  35. having the same trouble as the last few…..
    Would be nice if someone actually had an answer to the problem.

    Comment by Leah — November 24, 2008 #

  36. It shows offline on Myspace, even when logged in and page has been refreshed.

    Obviously other users are having the same problem based on previous post.

    Any ideas??

    Comment by Justin — December 2, 2008 #

  37. My pingbox ALWAYS shows me offline on my blog(ger)!! WHYY???

    Comment by Patience — December 6, 2008 #

  38. Same as everyone else no matter what site im always offline…even though through IM i can see people coming on and offline I just cant chat with them.

    It would be nice since you put it out there as a big launch to answer peoples concerns with this.

    Dont do like you did 360 yahoo and just get fed up with the bugs and leave it…

    Comment by DATdambabygirl — December 6, 2008 #

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