Tonight we had a completely different type of client launch: The all-new “Yahoo! Messenger for the Web” let’s people use Yahoo! Messenger without any client download. Instead, it’s implemented in Flash, so from any browser just visit the site and login. It’s not as full-featured as the regular client, but is really fast and has some UI elements that... (Read More)
Recently in IM Category
This is a very cool video made last November, but was just being circulated after it was posted as a comment on the Yahoo! Messenger blog: (YouTube link)... (Read More)
In conjunction with CES this week, we are showing a preview of a new Windows Vista version of Yahoo! Messenger. This client was created from scratch to take advantage of Vista technologies, particularly the user interface and display. Because they started fresh, the team was not hindered by the existing design and was able to test some new concepts... (Read More)
Tonight we launched the official Yahoo! Messenger Blog! (I say “we”, but I only played a small roll; our web developer Ryan, designer Chin, and product manager Sarah created this). So far there’s only a “first post” type message, but I know the product team has a lot of topics to discuss. Hopefully this blog will give some transparency... (Read More)
Back in December, we launched the public beta of Yahoo! Messenger 7.5 in eight countries. The significant new feature is PSTN (aka regular phone network) support, both to and from regular phone lines. That launch was kind of different for us because, although we did launch a US-English client, the service was not available inside the United States. Tonight we... (Read More)
Tonight we launched Yahoo! Messenger 7.5 Beta, delivering phone-in and phone-out support to PSTN (public switched telephone network, or “regular phones”). For rates that are quite low (inside the US, 1ยข per minute), you can call from Yahoo! Messenger to any phone in the world (“phone out”). You can also buy a live phone number (from anywhere in the world)... (Read More)
From clievideo.com comes Palm Webcam 1.0 -- a combination device/desktop application that turns camera-equipped Palm OS devices into a Windows webcam. I gave it a whirl with a Zire 72 and Treo 600 and it worked pretty well with Yahoo! Messenger. (Ahh, the best of both worlds...Palm and Yahoo!) The video quality in both cases was pretty good with a... (Read More)
Tonight we launched release 6.0 of the Yahoo! Messenger client! Going live to the web at 6pm this evening, this was a different sort of product launch than I'm used to, but it's definitely cool. I've only been here a month, so haven't really contributed to this release at all. But, it's been a good learning experience to watch the... (Read More)
One of the cool features of Yahoo! Messenger is "IMVironments™ -- or simply "IMVs". IMVs are kind of like a skin for your IM conversation window, but can also include interactivity and links to more content on the web. (See the full list of IMVs.) Today I was playing around with the Spider-Man 2 IMV and noticed a link to... (Read More)
