A New Hack Day With Three New Ideas

[tansqrx 0]

Yahoo! had another quarter annual Hack Day with three new ideas for Yahoo! Messenger (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/). The first is to integrate webcam into the web version of Messenger. Personally I think this is a duh moment as this was one of my first reactions when I used Web Messenger. I guess the hack is more that it happened than an innovative idea. The second is a real time translation of IMs similar to Babelfish (http://yahoo.com/). The last hack is a Yahoo! Answers bot.I see this list as already being sorted in descending order of likely to occur. My beat is the webcam will be added but it may take about a year or a new version of Web Messenger. The translator is of marginal value so I don’t see it happening. The Answers hack is just fluff so it should never see the light of day. (Of course in Yahoo! tradition, the Answers bot will be implemented next week while the webcam never happens.)