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Yahoo! Joins VoIP Throng

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the me-too dept.

Anders Bylund writes "Yahoo! is throwing their hat in the ring, adding Voice over IP features to the upcoming Yahoo Messenger release. With way too many players on the field, there's bound to be some kind of shakeout coming, right?"

5 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Skype ftw by AIX-Hood · · Score: 5, Informative

    Been using Skype for a while now and it still beats everyone else for 2 simple reasons: All advanced features work through a firewall with zero configuration, and it's fully encrypted. Yahoo, MSN, etc, talk to us again when you can boast these 2 features.

    1. Re:Skype ftw by sapgau · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yes but, some of us need to make calls to the public telephone lines sometimes. What are skype's rates for that?

    2. Re:Skype ftw by fufinache · · Score: 3, Informative
      Been using Skype for a while now and it still beats everyone else for 2 simple reasons

      It'll also beat the life out of your hard drive:

      "Unlike other applications, Skype polls the hard disk several times per minute. This can be verified either by observing the HDD led or by using a file access monitor such as Filemon. Although those accesses are small, extremely fast and safe in the short term, they can be extremely harmful in the long term. In particular the continuous access pattern does not allow the disk to enter sleep or idle modes while Skype is active, even when offline. This can severely reduce the lifespan of the HDD when Skype is running for a long time. Stronger HDD caching does not seem to improve the situation."

      from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype/

  2. yahoo! messenger! has! had! VoIP! for! 4! years! by iamstan · · Score: 4, Informative

    It even had the pc-to-phone feature back in 2001. So what is the news here? A press release advertising old features?

    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,55259,00.asp

  3. Re:Not really by timeOday · · Score: 2, Informative
    There has to be a common infrastructure; in this case the different IM backbones need to be connected, addressing needs to be tackled (I have the same alias on AIM and Yahoo, e.g.). For this to happen, a lot of the leaders are going to have to cooperate and conform to an open standard & directory.
    Surely that would be SIP.

    But even there, things can go wrong. Vonage locks down their users' SIP boxes so they cannot receive direct VOIP calls, only over the Vonage POTS bridge. Bummer.

    Sometimes I wonder how the Internet ever got big without getting strangled and destroyed by competing business interests. But I guess it's never too late for that.