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Yahoo! Opens up Their Instant Messenger
prostoalex writes "Reuters is reporting on the new release of Yahoo! Messenger, which will allow third-party applications and plugins to run within the Messenger environment. From the article: 'Initial partners include 30 Boxes, a calendar-sharing site that competes with Google Calendar, commodities trading site Hedgestreet.com and Pando.com, which offers a service for sharing videos or other files via BitTorrent technology. More than 100 mini-programs will be available initially.' The application is currently available in beta. Relatedly, Microsoft is removing the beta warning label from Windows Live Messenger and promises better voice communications, landline calls and future integration with Yahoo! Messenger."
Here's the link to the story that they forgot. A pity, though. They're only opening up the IM for extra, user made, modules. I was hoping they published code for the Yahoo messenger for the community. Hell, I'd be happy if they'd just update the linux version or at least make the current versions more WINE friendly. I'd like my voice chat and video, please.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
They don't even care for OS X version.
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That piece of shame isn't updated so it has some OS problems. A caring end user posted a patch to versiontracker and everyone installed it. I mean the people who need it.
Patch: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx
Yahoo Messenger (the scandal, check comments there!) http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx
Do companies make money from their proprietary instant messengers? Is it just ad revenue?
Both. Some companies sell "pro" IM clients and a number get ad revenue from the download page or from ads embedded in the client. The real money, of course, is in dominating the entire space so you can begin charging for access or tying to other features. No one has managed that and hopefully Google will get them to give up on it.
However, when will it be that instant messenging gets a standard protocol (or regains it, i.e. IRC)? When I want to email someone, I know their address and I can email them, I don't have to think about which program they are using to read/write their email. When I want to call someone on the phone, I dial their phone number to reach them anywhere in the world.
Additionally a standard protocols allows an individual or company to run their own server for security and stability reasons. Luckily, such a protocol exists. It is called Jabber and is an approved, open standard. Google has implemented it for their GTalk IM system and Apple has implemented it in their iChat program. I think GAIM supports it as does Trillian (pro only?). The difficulty is, since the existing protocols and social networks are closed, people can't easily migrate away without the ability to interchange. Hopefully, Google will take over enough of the market that other companies will see the value in being able to intercommunicate and we will all get that standard protocol and a defacto standard as well. You can already send messages via the Jabber protocol to anyone who has a Gmail account and the IM client is built into the Webmail interface to it. It works the same as e-mail for addressing, (username@gmail.com or username@somedomain.foo).
Maybe google will have one.
They already do. Also, Jabber is widely deployed in enterprise businesses for secure, internal messaging.