Yesterday’s announcement from Microsoft and Yahoo! on the inter-operability between their instant messengers is a good step forward in making it even easier for people to communicate via the net:
Consumers worldwide from Microsoft and Yahoo! will be able to take advantage of IM interoperability and join the limited public beta program. They will be among the first to exchange instant messages across the free services as well as see their friends’ online presence, view personal status messages, share select emoticons, view offline messages and add new contacts from either service at no cost. Yahoo! and Microsoft plan to make the interoperability between their respective IM services broadly available to consumers in the coming months.
I’ve not used Yahoo! Messenger but I do use MSN Messenger (now Windows Live Messenger) at times.
But I just want one IM client installed. None of this mutliple software installations and multiple contact IDs. AIM this. ICQ that. Yahoo the other. Just the one ID that works no matter what IM program I have installed.
I don’t use Trillian which can do a lot of that. What I do use all the time is Skype for text messaging, file transfers, etc, as well as for my phone.
Now if Skype could inter-operate with at least these two services, then you’re really talking.
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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
