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
