April 17, 2009 on 10:28 am | In Other services | 4 Comments
This post is a bit off-topic from Yahoo! Messenger, but a new Yahoo! product crossed my desk that I wanted to tell you about. Given all the Twitter mania going on this week, I thought you might find it interesting.
Even if you don’t personally use Twitter to communicate with friends, it can be a fascinating place to see what other people are talking about. Enter Yahoo! Sideline, a new desktop program that allows you to create and group custom Twitter searches by topics of interest. Here’s how it works…
Download Yahoo! Sideline
After you install Sideline and open up the program, you’ll be in the Trends tab. This is a list of popular topics on Twitter by keyword. When I first tried Sideline this week, I was intrigued by a trend on the list, “Susan Boyle”, so I had to see what all the buzz was about (I’m glad I did!). If you see a trend in the list you want to keep tabs on, click the “+” sign to the right. That will add it as its own tab so even if the trend falls off the top list, you can still track it on your own.
The real power of Sideline comes when you customize it to keep tabs on your own interests. We launched our new Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone app last week so I wanted to see what the Twitter community was saying about it. I clicked the “+” sign at the top near the group tabs, and entered a name for my search group (Messenger). Then I clicked the “Add Search Term” button on the right. From there, I entered the keywords I wanted Sideline to search for in the Twitter stream such as “yahoo messenger” and “messenger iphone”.
There are also “Advanced Search” options which let you select additional criteria for your search such as attitudes (positive or negative tone of comments), specific people (you’ll need to know their twitter IDs), and phrases and tags. All in all, a good set of filters to help you zero in on the tweets you care about most.
You can also add multiple search terms for a group; as you add them they stack up on the right hand side. For example, I could also add a search for one of our competitor’s iPhone apps if I wanted to keep tabs on that.
You can keep Sideline open on your desktop and it will refresh automatically with the latest tweets that match your search (or click refresh to hurry it up). Each group tab updates with the number of new matches that it finds.
When reviewing the tweets in a group, you’ll see two icons to the right – a star and a talk bubble. Click the star to add it to your Favorites tab, or click the talk balloon to reply to the tweet via Twitter.com (you’ll need a Twitter account). You can also click on the ID of the tweeter to visit their Twitter page.
We hope you enjoy playing around with Yahoo! Sideline. For a further deep dive check out this video review/demo. And if you want to give the Sideline team your feedback, you can connect with them on Twitter.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
March 19, 2009 on 1:38 pm | In 9.0 version, Other services | 13 Comments
Some of you have left comments here on the blog about errors you’re encountering when trying to update a friend’s contact information in Yahoo! Messenger. For example, when trying to update someone’s info, you might see this error when you try to save your changes:
Error: The last address book operation did not succeed due to a server error (-40402)
As you may or may not know, Yahoo! Messenger is integrated with the Yahoo! Address Book (part of Yahoo! Mail). As a result, when they are doing any kind or maintenance, upgrades or server work, it can result in some Yahoo! Messenger users encountering errors when they try to make changes to their address book content.
Currently, the Yahoo! Address Book team is upgrading some of their servers over the next few weeks. As a result, you may occasionally run into these types of errors.
As a workaround, you can try the edit again later in Yahoo! Messenger or to make your changes right away, head over to http://address.mail.yahoo.com and make your changes directly on the Address Book site.
Again, these types of errors are usually temporary and can be worked around by making changes directly on the Address Book site. Thanks for your patience,
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
March 12, 2009 on 8:00 am | In Other services, Pingbox | 43 Comments
Pingbox, our embeddable IM application for web pages, is now available for Facebook. Now you can put a Pingbox on your Facebook profile, and visitors to your page can IM you without having to download or sign into Yahoo! Messenger.
To add a Pingbox to your page, visit the Yahoo! Messenger Pingbox application page on Facebook. The same customization tools are available in the Facebook version, so you can personalize your online and offline greeting, choose from dozens of designs, and if you wish, require your visitors to give themselves a nickname before they can IM you.
With the Pingbox app, your friends can IM you from your profile page even when you’re not on Facebook.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
June 24, 2008 on 11:33 am | In Other services | 13 Comments
I came across a new online service today called dexrex.com whose tagline is “Saving your world one message at a time”. It’s designed to archive your instant message conversations on Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, Windows Live, Google Talk, Skype and Jabber (Windows versions only). It can also archive SMS conversations from your mobile phone, including Blackberry.
I gave it a test run to see how it did with archiving my Yahoo! Messenger conversations. The first step was to sign in with my Yahoo! ID and password. After that, I had to download and install a small Dexrex extension file to enable the capture and archive of my IM conversations in real-time. Installing the extension was painless and immediately, my IM conversations were captured in the background and uploaded to my dexrex.com account.
There is also a link to import your old IM conversations. After installing Java 6 on my PC at their suggestion, a scan was started to find the archives on my PC. It hung and didn’t really work for me, but in theory, you can get your old conversations imported and stored in your dexrex.com account.
Once your conversations are archived, you can use dexrex.com’s search box to quickly find a message. Dexrex has some handy automatic filters like one that lists out web links from your conversations. So rather than trying to remember a website a friend sent, just glance at the “Links” section in the sidebar to find it. They do the same auto-filtering for phone numbers and email addresses that appear in your conversations.
Dexrex also offers the ability to share a conversation with friends. When you click the “Share” link under a conversation, a page appears offering you a URL you can then send out to friends. When friends visit that URL, they’ll be able to read the transcript of your IM conversation on dexrex.com. If you change your mind, there is always a “Stop Sharing” button to make the conversation private again. You can also edit individual conversations to remove lines or to delete the entire conversation.
And finally there is an “Analyze” tab on the site where they’ll show you interesting statistics and trends about your conversations (like the average number of messages you send and duration of your conversations). This part of the site did not load properly for me but it may have been due to me only having a few hours worth of conversations archived.
Dexrex.com can be very handy for helping you organize and access your IM conversations. The search function works well and considering it’s free, it’s a nice add-on to your IM program. Keep in mind that you are storing your private conversations on a website, so if you have concerns about maintaining ultimate privacy, dexrex.com may not be the solution for you. According to their FAQ, all messages transmitted from your PC to dexrex.com via the extension are encrypted and there is an additional “Lockdown” feature you can add to your account for extra protection.
I was impressed by the ease in which I could search, filter, edit and delete conversations. In addition if you change your mind about using dexrex.com, there is a “Delete Account” button under the “My Account” section which will wipe out your archive. If you do that, be sure to also uninstall the dexrex.com extension from your PC to prevent future archiving.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
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