Jim's Random Notes

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I use Yahoo Messenger from time to time to talk to friends or to collaborate with the other programmer on my current project.  Messenger version 7.0 has a new feature (in my version it's still marked BETA) called LiveWords.  I was talking to a friend this morning when I mentioned Harry Potter.  Imagine my surprise when the message window showed "Harry Potter" lightly underlined.  Hovering my mouse over the words displayed a Yahoo Search popup that had the most popular Harry Potter search hits.  Or maybe they were sponsored links.

My immediate reaction was to go hunt down that feature and disable it, but after thinking about it for a bit I decided not to.  I've been using this version of Messenger (version 7,0,0,437) for several months now, and this is the first I've seen of LiveWords.  But now that I know it's there, I'll be looking for it.  It'll be interesting to see just what all gets linked.  I've already found out that I'm not popular enough.

Another interesting Messenger is the new "s:" command.  By typing "s:phrase", you can display the search results for "phrase" in the message window on your computer and on your chat partner's computer.  The message window gets the top search result and a "more results" link.  I just discovered the feature today, so I'm not yet certain how useful it will be.

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