2006’s Innovations in Instant Messaging

Old school instant messenger users remember when IM was just a back- and-forth exchange in plain text, and if you were feeling creative, an emoticon or an LOL. Today a world of fun and productivity is open to IM users as they connect by voice, animations, shared files, photos, and even video.

For IM innovation, 2006 was a watershed year. Nick Gonzalez of TechCrunch writes that the most exciting new features were interoperability, flexible identities, rich media chat, in-browser chat, location-based chat, and contextual chat.

Interoperability between instant messaging programs lets users communicate with friends who use different chat clients. A high point of our year was when interoperability between Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger became a reality last summer, creating the world’s largest instant messaging community. This means that you can have Windows Live Messenger friends on your Yahoo! contact list, and you can IM them right from Yahoo! Messenger.

Flexible identities are nothing new to savvy Yahoo! users. When you create a Yahoo! profile, you have the option to create an alias separate from your Yahoo! ID that you can use on various Yahoo! services, including Yahoo! Messenger. Multiple profiles are central to new services like the Flash-based client Wablet.

Last year, Yahoo! also introduced rich-media chat, which incorporates web cams, microphones, and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Gonzalez writes, “While voice and video does not lend itself to simultaneous conversations many IM users carry on, rich media integration brings a subtleness and depth absent from text-based IM.”

Alongside Yahoo! and Wablet, Meebo, RadiusIM, InCircles, Skype, and PalTalk are also pushing the envelope, making it easier than ever to connect and share with friends.

As Yahoo! Senior Vice President Brad Garlinghouse wrote in September, “When I look at the competitive dynamics around IM, I get really jazzed…. At the end of the day, the biggest winner…is you, the consumer.”

As we continue our work on Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista, 2007 is already off to a great start.We’re looking forward to bringing many more enhancements to your IM experience. You can read about them all, right here, on the blog.

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