Diwali, also known as the “Festival of Lights”, is a very significant Indian festival that symbolizes the victory of good over evil. This year it falls on October 17th.
Many Indians living outside of their home country will be calling home to wish their friends and family a happy Diwali. If you’re one of them, Yahoo! Messenger is a great way to stay connected not only during Diwali, but any time.
If your family and friends are already using Yahoo! Messenger, you can make high-quality PC-to-PC calls for free. And with the new video calling feature in Yahoo! Messenger 10, you’ll feel like you’re right there with them. Get great quality video, synched audio, even a full-screen mode.
If your friends and family aren’t using Yahoo! Messenger, you can still call them using Messenger, and enjoy great savings. Sign up for a Yahoo! Messenger Phone Out account and you can make calls to any landline or mobile phone in India for just 7.9¢ a minute – right from your desktop.
You can also send free SMS text messages from Messenger to your friends and family in India if they are on the following carriers: Vodaphone Essar, Airtel, Spice, Escotel, Reliance. Their replies come right back to you in Yahoo! Messenger. Find out how to SMS from Messenger.
Even if you just plan to IM friends this weekend to celebrate the festival, you can dress up for it. Head over to Yahoo! Avatars and search on “india” to find Indian-themed clothing and backgrounds. Or add a little Diwali with a custom display image. Click on one of the designs below to make it your display image (you need to be signed into Messenger before you click):
From the looks of Diwali pictures I found on Flickr (see slideshow below), the festival is bright, warm and colorful. Lamps (called “diyas”) are lit in homes, fireworks are set off, sparklers color the night air, gifts are exchanged and people eat all kinds of delicious Indian sweets and snacks made specifically for the festival. To learn more about Diwali, head over to diwalifestival.org.
Last year, we partnered with Jajah to power our paid voice services. Recently, they hit a major milestone that we want to congratulate them on – 1 billion calls connected.
Even more exciting for us is that the customer who placed the billionth call did it while using Yahoo! Messenger.
The historic billionth call on the JAJAH platform was made by Ila Zeff, a 29 year old resident of San Francisco, CA. Mrs Zeff made the call on Yahoo! Messenger using her Phone Out account. She was calling her mother in India, whom she calls at least weekly since moving to the United States from India.
Mrs Zeff said. “I use Yahoo! Voice to call my mother at least once a week. She still can’t believe I’m calling her from America and often says it sounds like I’m just up the road. I haven’t even told her I’m calling from my computer – she wouldn’t believe me.”
Congratulations to Jajah and special thanks to Mrs. Zeff for using Yahoo! Messenger to make her calls. We promise not to tell your mom.
I may be dating myself, but remember using rotary phones as a kid? And how solid (but really heavy) those handsets were?
A company called YUBZ has brought them back to life. For awhile now, they’ve been selling their retro handsets for use with mobile phones. Just plug the adapter in your cellphone and voila, you’re transported back to 1978.
Well they’re about to make it work with voice over IP too with a new product called the YUBZ Talk Jack.
YUBZ handsets are $44.95; the Talk Jack accessory, available in pink or black, is $19.50. Head over to the YUBZ website to get your retro groove on. If you’re into bling, be sure check out the limited-edition gold handset.
If you’re a Mac user that lives and dies by your Address Book, you’ll love this tool. One of our developers wrote a plug-in for the Mac Address Book application that lets you start a call on Yahoo! Messenger right from your friend’s contact card. Once the script is installed, you can right click on any contact’s phone number and you’ll see an option for “Call with Yahoo! Messenger”.
1) Download the zip file and unzip the contents (1 file entitled “Yahoo! Messenger.scpt”)
2) Double click the hard drive icon on your desktop, go to the Library folder, and find the folder entitled “Address Book Plug-ins” (~/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins/)
3) Drag and drop the Yahoo! Messenger.scpt file you downloaded into the Address Book Plug-ins folder. (You may be asked to authenticate the installation)
4) After restarting the Address Book, you will be able to right-click on anyone’s phone number and call them through Yahoo! Messenger.
For more information on making low-costs calls from your Mac to your friend’s mobile or landline phones, please visit our website.
Well, either our voice users are very organized or they have super secret calls they’re afraid will be discovered. To that end, we added back in the option to delete items from your call history list in Yahoo! Messenger 9.0.
Click a call to highlight it, then click the delete button above. To select multiple calls for deletion, use ctrl + click. To delete all your call history, click to select one in the list, then press ctrl + a on your keyboard to select them all. Note that we only show the one hundred most recent calls in the window. So if you delete them all, the next time you open that window the next hundred will be there.
And we know some users were experiencing a bug where the call history window was popping up every time you signed in (even if you didn’t have missed calls). We’ve fixed this problem so just sign out of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0, quit the application, then start it again and sign in. You’ll see the call history window one more time but on future sign-ins, you’ll only see it when you have missed calls or a voicemail.
Diwali, also known as the “Festival of Lights”, is a very significant Indian festival that symbolizes the victory of good over evil. This year it falls on October 17th. 
I may be dating myself, but remember using rotary phones as a kid? And how solid (but really heavy) those handsets were?
Click a call to highlight it, then click the delete button above. To select multiple calls for deletion, use ctrl + click. To delete all your call history, click to select one in the list, then press ctrl + a on your keyboard to select them all. Note that we only show the one hundred most recent calls in the window. So if you delete them all, the next time you open that window the next hundred will be there.