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Yahoo! Joins VoIP Throng
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?"
The more, the better. The IM/VOIP market is one of the few markets where we have true competition. If Yahoo! is going to make a better app with VOIP than what I currently use (Google Talk), then I'll switch.
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.
When calling overseas, it would be nice to forego the international rates in favor of much lower data packet rates on my cellphone. If there was a service that ran on my cellular phone that used VoIP data packets at a reasonable cost, that would be a huge step forward.
Sitting in front of my PC with a headset is not convenient.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I wonder if this is a step towards making VoIP basically a free tool, much like the web is today. It would be interesting if Yahoo or another VoIP provider go to an advertising model to support free VoIP.
I think it would be interesting to have ads while a call is being connected (i.e. ringing). It seems like they could pipe audio ads down the wire during the inevitable pause while the system tries to track down a cell phone, or the long distance call is being routed...
A company like Yahoo could also put a phone front end on to the search engine, I'm thinking along the lines of directory assistance, but instead of limiting info to just addresses / phones numbers, the Yahoo directory assistance would search the internet and speak the results (and a few related ads) over the phone.
They might even have the CPU power to do adequate speech recognotion. All told it is pretty easy to imagine a system taking adavtage of the newest phones, with enhanced SMS, web interfaces, along with a voice interface. It would also be cool if you could specify where you want your search result output to go. Maybe if they had VoIP and some type of phone based interafce you could have your results displayed on your phone, pda or spoken. With a viable VoIP perhaps you could have the results faxed to you at a hotel. I'd also like to see the option of having the results emailed.
All told these relatively small technical advancements, would be large strides in making Yahoo even more ubiqutious. Non-computer users and casual users would have another resource to get and retrieve information in the "real-world".
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