Yahoo! Chat Rooms: State Of The Union

If you are a reader of this blog, you will know that our vocal supporters of Yahoo! Messenger’s chat rooms are frustrated. It is completely understandable.

Though Yahoo! is a big company with over 10,000 employees around the world, a very small number of them work on our chat rooms; in fact you can count them on one hand.

Some of the most frequent complaints are about the instability of chat rooms, the annoying bots, and the lack of chat rooms in the Mac version. This summer, we will introduce improvements that address these issues. Here’s how:

Stability: For the past year, we have worked on rebuilding the entire back end of the chat room system. The original chat room servers are over seven years old, fossils in the world of the internet. They have been re-written from the ground up and are already running in “alpha” mode in our data centers. They will be rolled out to our everyday chat rooms users in the next month. This will greatly improve the speed and stability of chat rooms in the short term. In the long term, it will enable us to continue improving our chat rooms more quickly and efficiently.

Bots: In the next few weeks, we will begin rolling out new security measures to distinguish the humans from the machines. Humans are welcome, machines are not. The result will be a dramatic decrease in the number of “bots” that are spoiling chat rooms.

Mac chat rooms: We are already beta testing a new version of Messenger for Mac that includes, among its many improvements, native support for chat rooms. Yes you read it correctly, native support for Mac chat rooms! Client software is tricky, of course, and sometimes the “bug fixing” takes longer than we anticipate. But we believe it is more important to have a delay and get it right, than to rush and make a mistake. Like the chat rooms team, the Mac team is a small one, but they make up for it with their talents.
As a Mac user myself, I am very glad that we continue to actively support such a great platform as the Mac OS. We appreciate your patience while we get this next version ready.

We know you have been living a long time with the less-than-stellar state of Yahoo! chat rooms. We appreciate your patience as these improvements become available.

Aside from chat rooms, we are also hard at work on a number of great new things from the Yahoo! Messenger team. Millions of you are already enjoying our recently released Yahoo! Messenger for the Web (http://web.im). There is a lot more great stuff coming, so hold on tight.

Jeff Bonforte
Vice President
Yahoo! Messenger

Source: Yahoo! Messenger Blog » Chat rooms: State of the Union