Status: Having a blast
| Monday, April 23rd, 2007 | --Sean |
I know that the Messenger team gets a lot of flak in their blog's comment section ("why havent you fixed chat rooms?!?"), which is a shame because they usually cover fun, interesting topics and they're very good about posting regularly as well as responding to comments. To be fair, I guess they should work a bit on fixing chat rooms. Anyway, one really cool thing that I learned in browsing through their archives is that you can use your Messenger status to blast links to your friends (like the Y! 360 blast feature). If you insert a valid looking URL anywhere into your status message, it'll get stripped from the text of the status and linked whenever your friends click on your status from their Friends list. Example:
"http://ycoolthing.com This is cool. (Thing.) (of the day)"
A bit of experimentation revealed that, if you include multiple URLs, the first URL wins and any subesquent URLs are preserved in the text (which could be useful if you wanted to explicitly write out a URL in your status). And, yup, you can include the URL anywhere in the status, not just the start or end. Check out a few more status tricks over at the Messenger blog, and don't forget to ask them about your chat rooms.
EDIT: At second glance, there's only one more status trick in that last link. My bad.