This just in from Yahoo Messenger’s blog:

At a recent Hack Day, a team of four Yahoos built and presented “Discovr”, a hack that would enable users to find new friends on Yahoo! Messenger by seeing who their IM contacts have on their list. A “friends of friends” concept. Discovr was created by Yahoos Ashwinder Ahluwalia, Vinay Kakade, Pras Sarkar and Ramana Yerneni.

They showed me a web-based prototype of this “friend-finder”. Here’s how it worked: After typing in my Yahoo! ID, I saw a list of other Yahoo! IDs that appear on my IM friends’ friends list. Sort of like peeking into my friend’s contact lists, except that I don’t know which friend belongs to whom; it’s just an aggregate look at the universe of my friends’ contacts. There was also relevancy rankings so I could get a feel for which of these new potential friends is the most connected in my IM community. If a Yahoo! ID appears on the contact lists of 12 of my friends, it ranks highly; if it only appears on a few, the score is lower.

This product would obviously raise certain privacy concerns and will most likely not become a reality.

Remember, this is just a concept from Hack Day and though team Discovr built a compelling prototype, it’s not something you’ll see in Yahoo! Messenger in the near future.

Here is a screenshot from the Hack Day web app:

Posted in Hacks, Yahoo! Messenger 6 Comments »