Embed Yahoo Messenger on Your Blog with Pingbox

Yahoo Messenger is one of the most popular instant messenger services out there with hundreds of millions of users. With such a large potential audience, it makes sense to tap into it on your own site and one way of doing that is by adding Yahoo Messenger Pingbox, the embeddable chat widget from Yahoo. Apparently, it is one of the less-known features, despite its potential usefulness, which is why Yahoo decided to spotlight it.

"One of our lesser known but very useful products is the Yahoo! Messenger Pingbox. With a copy and paste of some code, you can embed a chat window into your website, blog or social networking page. Then when visitors come to your page, they can see when you’re online and initiate a private IM conversation with you," Yahoo explains.

There are plenty of chat widgets out there, but Yahoo Messenger Pingbox is an interesting option. This because it's not just an embeddable Yahoo Messenger client, it acts as a gateway providing chat options for your blog or your site that just happens to interconnect with Yahoo Messenger.

Visitors to the site don't have to have a Yahoo account to start a new chat and they can even do it anonymously. If the site owner is logged into Yahoo Messenger, he or she will show as online in the Pingbox widget. This can be customized if you don't want to be bothered at certain times by going invisible just for the chat box.

Then, if a visitor wants to chat, the conversation will show up as just another conversation in Yahoo Messenger. And all visitors show up in the contacts list in a special group, if you want to keep an eye on how many people are on your site at one point. You will need Yahoo Messenger 10 or Yahoo Messenger for Mac in order for the Pingbox feature to work. Installing Yahoo Messenger Pingbox is easy enough, just visit this page and click "Create a Pingbox." After you're done customizing the look of the widget, you will get a JavaScript code you can embed on your blog.

Yahoo Messenger 10 (full installer) is available for download here.