Yahoo Messenger might be the best messaging app no one will use. The company just released a completely revamped version of its messaging platform, focused on mobile, group messaging and image sharing. In other words, Yahoo Messenger looks like Facebook Messenger, or WeChat, or WhatsApp, or Viber, or Line… You get the point, do we need yet another messaging app?
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]]>Thought Yahoo's acquisition spree would culminate with its $1.1 billion Tumblr purchase? Well, not so much. In fact, the buy-happy company just quietly made its second acquisition in 24 hours -- in two completely different verticals, no less. Yes, Yahoo followed this morning's purchase of iOS photo app maker, GhostBird Software, by making a play into the enterprise conference calling space. Wait, what?
Yes, users of six-year-old free conference calling service, Rondee, were tonight informed via email that the startup has been acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed sum. It will also suffer the same fate met by other recent Yahoo acquisitions -- like MileWise, Astrid, GoPollGo and Loki Studios to name just four -- in that it will soon be going the way of the dinosaur. After June 30th, the company's website now reads, users will no longer be allowed to access their data or create new conference calls.
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At the risk of sounding like we're kicking a dead horse — then lighting it on fire — we've been able to confirm another significant departure from Yahoo this evening.Raj Vemulapalli, Yahoo'sHead of Engineering for Real Time Communications, is leaving, the company has confirmed to us.
Vemulapalli, amazingly, has been with Yahoo for over 11 years. Over that span he has worked his way up the engineering ranks, culminating in his position leading some of the few products that have been bright spots for Yahoo in recent years. That includes the massively-used Yahoo Messenger product, and all of the other messaging integration across the various Yahoo products.
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Arguably a little late to the party, Yahoo! today announced the release of their very first Android apps for Messenger and Mail, a Yahoo! search widget for your home screen and some HTML5-optimized sites for the iPhone.
The Messenger app does pretty much what you'd expect: it allows you to chat with your Yahoo!/MSN friends, and can run in the background (with push notifications) for that always-on availability. If you live in Canada, Indonesia, India, Kuwait, Malaysia, Philippines, Pakistan, Thailand, United States, or Vietnam, you can also use the app to send SMS to friends, which will appear in the current conversation.
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We'll say it right off the bat: what the hell took Microsoft so long? Years after Yahoo and Google integrated web IM features into their free webmail services (Yahoo Messenger in Yahoo Mail and Gtalk in Gmail, respectively), Redmond is finally enabling users to log into their Hotmail accounts and converse with their contacts over instant messaging directly without the need to log on to Windows Live Messenger separately, or to even have the program installed altogether.
The new feature will be gradually rolled out, starting from today enabling subsets of users in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and USA to send instant messages from the Windows Live Hotmail and People pages. The feature earlier rolled out to some users users in France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the UK.
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Yahoo Messenger now has an iPhone app (iTunes link). It lets you IM your friends, see their status, share photos, share links, choose emoticons, and see recent conversations. It also lets you send free text messages by choosing a contact's mobile phone number if they are not online. Replies come back to the app, which could save you a dime each time.
When you leave the app to answer a call or do something else on your iPhone, your status is changed to idle. You can also sign out of the app entirely. (This is a workaround to the inability to have multiple apps running at the same time in the background on the iPhone).
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]]>Previously available by invite only, mundu is now available to the rest of us. It allows you to use your Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and AIM accounts with ease. Emphasis on “ease.” I was up and running and logged in on my iPod Touch in under a minute. Very, very simple stuff here. You’re able to […]
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]]>The Yahoo! IM team just released the 3.0 version of Yahoo! IM for Mac. Yahoo! Messenger for Mac was last updated in September, 2003. Its feature set is interesting, but it appears to lack two of the PC version’s most compelling qualities: VOIP and the growing library of plugins built on the recently released software […]
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]]>Yahoo isn’t just testing a new home page layout – they are also testing a new wifi service with selected users. The survey (screen shot below) suggests that Yahoo’s new messenger product will be able to access certain wifi networks and allow IMing and VOIP calls (this is assuming those networks are restricted in some […]
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]]>This has been coming for a long time, but starting tomorrow (March 22) you can download (if you have a Windows machine, that is) the new Yahoo IM client with full inbound and outbound VOIP capabilities. That means that, like Skype, users will be able to receive call from, and make calls to, any normal […]
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