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May 2, 2007

Yahoo Launches Browser Version of Messenger

Michael Arrington

48 comments »

eBuddy and Meebo made it clear that there is significant demand for instant messaging via the browser - many users work from computers where they can’t download software and so web based instant messaging is the only way they can use the service.

Microsoft has its own web messenger and Google’s Gtalk is integrated into Gmail and other properties. Yahoo has also experimented with web chat previously, with their integration of chat into their Yahoo Mail site.

This evening Yahoo will launch a dedicated site for Yahoo chat at webmessenger.yahoo.com. It should be live around 6 pm PST. They will also be publishing a screencast overview of the service a little later here.

Unlike most other web based chat services, Yahoo Web Messenger is built on Flash 9. At launch it will include only basic functionality, and is integrated with MSN Messenger (you can add Live/MSN Messenger contacts to your Yahoo friends list). Users can also add avatars and emoticons are supported. Yahoo says VOIP functionality may be added later.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Farhad

    May 2nd, 2007 at 6:13 pm

    It’s fine to use flash as long as its not too slow.
    As for web messenger, so far so good.

  2. Ilya

    May 2nd, 2007 at 6:19 pm

    bye bye meebo nice knowing you :|

  3. George P.

    May 2nd, 2007 at 6:20 pm

    very impressive, quick and responsive

  4. Chandra Bajpai

    May 2nd, 2007 at 6:21 pm

    What’s it with all these established behemoth Web 1.0 companies destroying the new guys….First Ebay/AuctionAds and now Yahoo/Meebo.

    To Meebo’s credit they do support more than just Yahoo.
    Like trillian for the web. I still dont understand the revenue model though.

  5. Allen Stern

    May 2nd, 2007 at 6:33 pm

    Here is what I just wrote about this on CN (click my name)…

    So?

  6. Mike @ Emerging Earth

    May 2nd, 2007 at 6:44 pm

    Finally!

  7. eBusiness

    May 2nd, 2007 at 6:49 pm

    About Time!

  8. Gopi

    May 2nd, 2007 at 6:50 pm

    Considering the huge banner inventory this creates, this would be much more profitable for yahoo than the messenger client.

  9. Anshul

    May 2nd, 2007 at 7:16 pm

    Why is yahoo so slow to release such apps.

  10. Jorge

    May 2nd, 2007 at 7:24 pm

    Better slow and quality than fast and crap like Google…I mean…GBeta.

  11. Mike @ Emerging Earth

    May 2nd, 2007 at 7:50 pm

    As always, Microsoft is the loser in this area: both Yahoo’s and Google’s Web IM offerings are snappier than theirs.

  12. Pallab

    May 2nd, 2007 at 8:11 pm

    And it supports Opera for a change!!
    Way to to yahoo.

  13. met

    May 2nd, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    Mike@Emerging Earth: With Silverlight, it would only take MS two days to develop such an app with animations.

  14. trakin

    May 2nd, 2007 at 8:52 pm

    Wow….I have been looking forward for this for a long time….I thought they are a bit late on this. Just tried it out, works like a chartm…

  15. Hiro

    May 2nd, 2007 at 9:13 pm

    Hey Michael,

    I think it was just yesterday you came back from MIX and called Flex/Flash a “toy”. This Flex 2/Flash Player 9 app seems to work quite well.

  16. Wes

    May 2nd, 2007 at 9:19 pm

    Even with basic functionality it looks good.

  17. Chatt

    May 2nd, 2007 at 9:45 pm

    M$ has a tendency to belittle anyone they want to compete with. This strategy works sometimes, but definitely not the right thing to do. Silverlight hardly has an adoption story, their open-source strategy is dubious, and finally - who can trust MS?

    Flex/Flash is a ‘toy’ ‘coz its as easy to work with. I also like the fact that since its based on Flex/Flash, its going to work on all browsers for me.

  18. No, seriously... Where's innovation?

    May 2nd, 2007 at 10:26 pm

    Web messenger is just reinventing wheel. We got web chatroom, instant message ajax, etc…

    What’s innovation for yahoo web messanger?

    What’s new about besides graphics.

  19. Jason M. Lemkin

    May 2nd, 2007 at 10:52 pm

    How can this not be integrated into MyYahoo??

  20. Pallab

    May 2nd, 2007 at 11:24 pm

    Damn them. Its not available in India ( @yahoo.co.in).

  21. trevo

    May 2nd, 2007 at 11:57 pm

    OK… now why can’t they do this on Flash 8?

  22. milan

    May 3rd, 2007 at 1:52 am

    You forgot to tell that it is made with toys :)
    Just like finance page (http://finance.yahoo.com/charts), maps (http://maps.yahoo.com/), etc., etc.

  23. kenny

    May 3rd, 2007 at 4:30 am

    This article didn’t mention that the user has to be running Windows in order to use Microsoft’s Web Messenger. Very web friendly.

  24. Mike Potter

    May 3rd, 2007 at 5:40 am

    @trevo: The application was built with Flex, which relies on ActionScript 3 and requires the new virtual machine that is only available in Flash Player 9.

    The code is JIT compiled, which is why this appliation runs so quickly.

    There’s a showcase of Flex applications online at http://www.flex.org/showcase/

    Mike

  25. david lee king

    May 3rd, 2007 at 6:39 am

    Umm… Yahoo’s had a yahoo web messenger for at least a year and a half - that’s not news.

  26. AJ Batac

    May 3rd, 2007 at 6:58 am

    ohh… meebo is still in the game. unless yahoo will incorporate icq and msn, then meebo is really “bye bye”. ;)

  27. pallet jack

    May 3rd, 2007 at 7:06 am

    Im just happy to see Yahoo! still has some programmers working for them, not just a big call center.

    Rather its late or not, its a good sign

  28. Mark Zuckerberg

    May 3rd, 2007 at 7:15 am

    Screw messenger!

    Yahoo is to be a serious player in the social networking space then it needs to buy my site Facebook for eight billion.

    Passing on Facebook will be a mistake similar to what happened four years back when Yahoo did not buy Google for three billion. Instead it bought that junkie Mark Cuban’s site broadcast.com for five billion shortly after which it went brain dead like Cuban’s dad. Now how much is Google worth?

    Yahoo must take steps to gain a real leadership position in social networking or risk not participating in what could be one of the leading sources of growth in the consumer Internet sector over the next five-plus years. It is this growth that leads me to estimate that in five years time Facebook will be worth at least 15 billion.
    If that embarassment Semel does not buy Facebook then he should be fired. That is what happened to Viacom’s Freston after he did not buy MySpace. Having said that if I was a founder of MySpace Tom Anderson then I would have slit murdoch’s throat a long time ago for robbing me and my shareholders of billions of dollars. After buying MySpace for 580 mil News corp does a deal with Google for 900 mil. That was sheer daylight robbery. If Yahoo’s managers are not clueless they will buy Facebook
    before it is too late.

    This is also a great tinme to be a web 2.0 entrepreneur. Companies like CBS are lining up in the region of three billion for the next youtube. So there is a good chance to hit the lottery even if the product is junk. Often during boomtime people act stupidly like when Terra bought Lycos which is now dead and buried for $12.5 billion and @Home paid $7.2 billion buy for Excite.

    Certainly people like Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Bob Davis were my role models when I decided to hide online instead of hacking it out in a Mcjob in the real world. They created a junk startup Excite and hit a home run. Though the merger between Excite and @Home fell disastrously short of expectations these bums who took it easy in life laughed all the way to the bank. I hope to similarly be a role model to other net entrepreneurs.

    mrkzuckerberg@yahoo.com

  29. David Mackey

    May 3rd, 2007 at 7:27 am

    Blahh Flash. But interesting move. Kind of funny in a sense. As developers we moved away from runtimes to compiled code. Now we are in a sense moving back to runtimes - where the browser is the runtime.

  30. sheenamelissa

    May 3rd, 2007 at 7:48 am

    i like it esp when the tabs at the main browser “marquees”… when there’s an alert… it’s cool.

  31. Mousefinger

    May 3rd, 2007 at 8:15 am

    Yay!

  32. Oppressed

    May 3rd, 2007 at 8:19 am

    Don’t even bother,

    perfectly blocked by our firewall ….

  33. Amby

    May 3rd, 2007 at 8:31 am

    So does it do Jabber/XMPP?

  34. Juston

    May 3rd, 2007 at 8:59 am

    just go to koolim.com, this has already been done by man, meebo, ebuddy, etc.

  35. nomadicalloy

    May 3rd, 2007 at 9:37 am

    so whats going to happen to meebo, now that you can msn and yahoo on yahoo web IM.

  36. Trae Dorn

    May 3rd, 2007 at 11:46 am

    While this appears to be a new way of doing it, Yahoo has had a web based version of their IM software (previously in Java) since at least 1999. It’s nice to see a pretty flash upgrade over the relatively ugly Java interface, but overall this isn’t anything they haven’t been doing for years. Really, most of the major IM systems have had web based versions for over half a decade if not longer

  37. Daniel

    May 3rd, 2007 at 2:51 pm

    Meebo is still my fav :)

  38. Toby

    May 5th, 2007 at 9:15 am

    Interesting stats published by Center Networks

    http://www.centernetworks.com/.....ger-market

    Instant messaging is definitely a huge market!

    Apparantly eBuddy is bigger than Meebo, in the category of IM aggregators.

  39. Tim A

    May 7th, 2007 at 2:59 pm

    They’ve had web based IM for many many years now so this is definitely nothing new. I don’t believe it was Flash based but I’ve used it for at least 2-3 years and likely longer.

  40. Nabelrock

    May 15th, 2007 at 9:15 pm

    still waiting for Trillian Web……

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