YAHOO MESSENGER - 800 WORDS
Written: Oct 21 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fun, good for work/research, chatting and organising lifestyle
Cons: Pathetic hacking, imitations etc could happen if someone simply knows your postcode and birthdate. Grr!
The Bottom Line: Fun & customisable.
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| thebluecomet's Full Review: Yahoo! Messenger |
Before, these messenger programmes were not that popular, but since the arrival of unmetred internet access in the UK, they are familiar to a considerable proportion of users.
If you are not familiar with what Yahoo Messenger is, it is a programme, similar to the likes of MSN and AOL Messenger, that enable you to know when your friends are also online and you are able to have interactive conversations with them over the net.
Setting up a Yahoo account is not too difficult, and it could take 5 minutes to sign up, then download the messenger and chat to your friends. The Messenger programme is about 1MB for the full version, 400Kb for basic ones.
And Yahoo Messenger can certainly be a lot of fun, you can have confidential conversations with e.g. 5 of your friends. You can also start “conferences” where all your online friends can take part in the same discussion.
It is also useful for homework / work, as you are able to discuss answers, send each other website addresses, as well as attachments.
If you are not a heavy e-mail user, then Yahoo Messenger could replace your e-mail address, as people can send you messages when your are offline, which you shall instantly receive when you log on.
There is a button at the top of the Messenger window called “Chat” – clicking this button leads you to a chatworld where you can join one of literally hundreds of chatrooms covering all topics such as sport, music, romance etc.
When you get a Yahoo account, you are able to get a profile page which gives viewers information about yourself, such as a picture, hobbies and homepage hyperlinks – on http://profiles.yahoo.com/username .
One of the main criticisms for Yahoo Messenger is that it is ridiculously simple to hack into somebody’s account. Myself and many other users have had this problem – if someone simply knows your birthday, postcode and a simple question such as where you were born, they will be able to change your password, causing many potential problems. Grr.
A further problem that has been encountered is people creating false and anomonous ID s and trying to pretend to be other users etc. This has caused many problems, and Yahoo don’t help – if you send a complaint to their customer care they appear never to respond. Grr.
Basically with these kinds of problems I realised that even though there appeared to be such a great friendship group, at least 1 person is acting shady - this leads to accusations. Falling out over a computer - sounds very sad maybe but there you go...
If you can trust your “friends” not to be sadistic hackers then it should all be fine though – and Yahoo will be a fun place. You can use a variety of animated emoticons ;-) etc in your conversations.
However, downloading a messenger programme could be a test for your discipline – you must learn to be able to use it for limited periods so that it does not occupy (waste) too much of your time. At my worst, I would come home from college at 4pm and be online till 1am – a similar problem may have been encountered by some of my friends.
There is also the VoiceChat feature, so using your microphone and speaker you can have a phone-style conversation with your friends… the difference being that if you have an unmetred ISP this could be FREE. However you will need at least a 56K modem and a reliable well streamlined server to have a good quality conversation without “bitty” sound quality.
If you meet people on a chatroom, you could talk to them using VoiceChat, so with a free ISP this could effectively mean calling Australia or Japan or whatever for free. There is also an embedded call feature which enables 100% free phone calls to USA. Canada soon I think
You can customise the features, such as the font you use and colour. Also, you can have colour blending, so that e.g. your text begins red and by the end of the sentence it has ‘merged’ into blue. Not necessary but a nice addition.
You can also add skins to your messenger program – instead of a boring white background, you could download one with your favourite band / artist photo, painting or anything…
So overall I would recommend giving Yahoo Messenger a try – what is important is that you get all your friends to use one Messenger programme – at the moment I talk to a few people on Yahoo, some on MSN and some on Napster.
However, familiar users will realise that a lot of the features that I stated above such as font changing, voice chat and conferences are typical features of a variety of other Messenger programmes including MSN, so you may want to look at other reviews.
Check out a skin I designed for Yahoo Messenger - download it free at www.bluecomet.f2s.com/yahoo.htm
Recommended:
Yes
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thebluecomet
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Reviews written: 7
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