A Ping in a Blogpost
| Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 | --Sean |
Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 (for Windows) has come out of Beta, and along with all of the standard polish is the entirely unexpected inclusion of an embeddable one-to-one chat widget, christened Pingbox™.
The Pingbox Studio is dead simple to play with, letting you manage up to 10 distinct Pingboxes™ that you can stick just about anywhere. There's sadly a limit of 100 concurrent users per Pingbox™, but it still provides an easy way for an owner of a small site to foster some direct communication with users (without exposing any Yahoo! contact information!). There's also pretty tight integration with the new Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 -- you're given new groups to manage all of the visitors to your Pingboxes™, and you can enable or disable the widgets directly from your messenger list. The Help page covers most everything else, or, hey, just ask above. It would be kind of nice if users could leave messages or if there was a way to force visitors to engage the widget before it activated (so that you wouldn't max out the 100 visitor cap solely on passive users drifting by), but I'm sure it'll evolve as more people get to play with it.