The Yahoo! Messenger development team announced that there have been a few minor upgrades to the web version of Yahoo! Messenger (http://blog.messenger.yahoo.com/blog/2007/09/24/yahoo-messenger-for-the-web-new-release/). From what I can see nothing major has been added except for SMS to mobile users and a few new languages for India. Apparently the web version of Messenger has taken off in India as nine new languages are added for that region. You add the support for the biggest demand.

The latest blog post from the Yahoo! Messenger development teams is about Discovr, a proposed new way of sharing Messenger contacts. As is stands Messenger is a closed social community. It is very hard to discover new buddies unless you start trolling around the chat rooms or have a buddy in real life. Discovr is a method to make Messenger more like Facebook or Myspace where everyone knows who your friends are.

Discovr came from Hack Days, a common occurrence at Yahoo! that encourages different departments to throw out new ideas. (To think Yahoo! actually names it Hack Days is a surprise in itself.) The new system would only list your friends friends and not which friend they came from. This will in itself help to insulate some of the privacy concerns surrounding this new proposal.

From the comments I am reading in the postbacks I can not say this idea will be welcomed by many in the community. An overwhelming majority of posters did not like the idea for fear of privacy concerns. As one poster put it:

noooooo wayyyyyyyyyyyy BIG “FOE” i keep my friends private, and thinks it is the way it should stay, my friends do not need to know who i have in my friends list, thats not even cool! and i dont think it is right! i keep my friends list very private and dont wish anyone to know that info!! i would have to not have any friends, in order to allow this feature… please realize a list you choose of friends, is a very personal and private thing… feels like an invasion of my privacy

Another poster did not think it was a big issue because tabbed IM windows were previously proposed at a previous Hack Day and that has clearly yet to materialize.

For anyone who depends on inherent privacy through Yahoo! Messenger, I would suggest segregating your wife and 3 girlfriends into different Yahoo! IDs before this is implemented.

Just in case you haven’t been keeping up with Yahoo! Chat, it looks like a new sheriff is in town (http://blog.messenger.yahoo.com/blog/2007/08/29/new-entry-process-for-chat-rooms/). Just before the Labor Day weekend Yahoo! started making users enter a captcha before they could enter a chat room. This could possibly mean that the chat rooms will be bot free for the time being.

My first impression of the system was not that bad. I logged in with Yahelite and was quickly prompted to enter the captcha in a separate dialogue box. I do have to admit that the process did get very tedious as you have to enter the captcha every single time you change rooms. This is very hard on me because I tend to change rooms almost every minute. I have also noted that the captchas are getting longer. This is most likely to make it harder for captcha guessing program to work.

My impressions of the new system quickly went down hill once I tried to chat from the official Messenger client. Instead of a dialogue box, a hyperlink appears. The link opens your default web browser where you are then presented with the image and a space to enter the text. The soon became way too bothersome and I reverted back to Yahelite.

The last comment on this new scheme is one of bot evolution. The captcha for chat is brand new and thus the bot writers have not had time to catch up. As I have discussed before, there are already programs that can correctly guess the captcha more than 95% of the time. It is only a matter of time before these technologies are adapted to chat bots once again. Even if the majority of bots do adapt, the less programming adept writers will be left out and thus few bots will be in the rooms, even in the long run.

P.S. The captcha guesser mentioned was only academic and the source code was never released. If someone does come up with the code to get through the captchas I would be very interested to hear from you.