Yahoo announced that it now offers an SMS chat feature in its classic version of Yahoo Mail, something Gmail has been offering for several months, and Yahoo has been doing in its newer version since 2007.
Google has offered SMS in its chat since October, and Chat in general for quite some time. They have also launched voice and video chat recently.
Anyhow, with Yahoo’s chat you can communicate with other people using Yahoo as well as mobile phones. Product Manager Brandon Savage writes:
How does it work, you ask? Well, when you sign into your Yahoo! Mail Classic account, your Chat & Mobile Text contact list will appear on the left of your screen (you can place it above or below your personal folders, whichever you prefer). If your status says “Offline,” just click on it and select “Available” to sign in (fair warning to Yahoo! Messenger users: signing in here will log you out elsewhere). Once you do, you’ll see a list of all of your Contacts who are online and available to chat. We also show you the names of any Contacts with mobile phone numbers, for mobile texting, of course. Just click on a name to start a conversation!
The competition between Yahoo and Google in email certainly does seem to be heating up lately. Back in the summer, Yahoo unveiled its offline email client, which Google has just gotten around to. It will be interesting to see what the market share looks like later in th year.
