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’s Head 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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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). → Read More
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 be logged in to more than one service at a time and you can make your own status messages and remove contacts directly. It also handles smileys. Best of all, there’s nothing to install. Just point your iPhone’s browser (iPod Touch, too) to iphone.mundu.com and you’ll be good to go. Mundu IM for Apple iPhone [MobileWhack] → Read More
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 development kit. It’s hard for me to imagine using any single IM client on my Mac when I can use Adium and connect with all major IM systems at once. Here’s what it does have: A new interface built in Cocoa, very OS X looking. Avatars and animated emoticons, which I’m sure will appeal to a wide audience. Webcam support, compatible across PCs and Macs – though I personally IM when I don’t want to communicate intimately. Custom stealth settings, eg. everybody but my ex-girlfriend can see that I’m available if I don’t want to talk to her. Visual notifications using the Growl system. IM alerts for Yahoo! Calendar, Mail and Personals. Good idea on their part, but IM alerts for any RSS feed would be even better. Coming soon: chat with Windows Live (MSN) users. It will be a beautiful day if even the smallest amount of forward progress towards IM compatibility appears. I’ll be very curious to see if the VOIP and plug-ins available to PC users are included in the future features the company promises. → Read More
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 way). They do not name the networks the may be partnering with, but do say: Now when you are on the move to the places that you go most – airports, hotels, coffee shots – you can stop twiddling your thumbs and start communicatinig via instant message with the people you care about most…all for free. If the service goes live, you will also be able to get unrestricted access to those networks for $7.95 per month, or two hours for $2.95. Screen shot below. Thanks Razvan for the tip. → Read More
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 telephone (standard telephone service is often referred to as “POTS”). Screen shot is below. Pricing is competitve to Skype: Phone Out: Call normal phone numbers in 180 or so countries from your PC. Pricing starts at $0.02 per minute. For more on rates, see here. Phone In: (for U.S., France and UK users only) – Receive calls on your PC from traditional and mobile phones for $2.99 per month or $29.90 per year. Free Voicemail: Free voicemail for inbound calls, and voicemail messages are linked from Yahoo Mail. Phone Out on Yahoo is a little cheaper than Skype on average (Skype rates, in Euros, are here). Phone In is also cheaper – Skype charges 30 Euros per year for their comparable product. Skype has video calls, of course, and Yahoo doesn’t. Neither company frustratingly, allows for call recording (Gizmo has this feature and I love it). Yahoo licenses GIPS VoiceEngine Multimedia infrastructure for the back end VOIP technology. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
