The latest blog post from the Yahoo! Messenger development teams is about Discovr, a proposed new way of sharing Messenger contacts. As is stands Messenger is a closed social community. It is very hard to discover new buddies unless you start trolling around the chat rooms or have a buddy in real life. Discovr is a method to make Messenger more like Facebook or Myspace where everyone knows who your friends are.

Discovr came from Hack Days, a common occurrence at Yahoo! that encourages different departments to throw out new ideas. (To think Yahoo! actually names it Hack Days is a surprise in itself.) The new system would only list your friends friends and not which friend they came from. This will in itself help to insulate some of the privacy concerns surrounding this new proposal.

From the comments I am reading in the postbacks I can not say this idea will be welcomed by many in the community. An overwhelming majority of posters did not like the idea for fear of privacy concerns. As one poster put it:



Another poster did not think it was a big issue because tabbed IM windows were previously proposed at a previous Hack Day and that has clearly yet to materialize.

For anyone who depends on inherent privacy through Yahoo! Messenger, I would suggest segregating your wife and 3 girlfriends into different Yahoo! IDs before this is implemented.

Great but how can I find the e-mail adress of someone who is disturbing me!

Can you give a little bit more detail? How are they disturbing you?