When you are late to the game, trying to rename it doesn’t win you any points. Today, Yahoo announced that it is finally adding basic status updates to its Mail and Messenger products, which it is calling “status-casting.” In both Yahoo Mail and Messenger 10, you can update your status and all of your contacts who also use either of those two products can see your updates. You can also choose to see your friends’ updates from a variety of social media sites across the Web—such as Yelp, YouTube, and Twitter— right in your Mail homepage or IM stream.
Yahoo is making its communications products more social by combining private and public message streams in much the same way that AOL added lifestreaming to AIM last month. (That’s right, AOL beat Yahoo to this feature set by more than a month).
On the one hand, Yahoo wants to use the popularity of Yahoo Mail (which is the No. 1 Web mail service with 300 million people using it worldwide) to get into the micro-messaging game. Just like it did with Yahoo profiles at the beginning of the year, you can now add 140-character updates via Yahoo Mail to other people on Yahoo. It also lets you and keep track of what your contacts are doing across other social sites. These appear under a new updates section on the Yahoo Mail landing page.
Yahoo Messenger lets you do the same things—create updates across your Yahoo network and see updates from your IM buddies happening elsewhere. But it doesn’t appear to be a two-way connection. You can read your friends’ updates on Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and elsewhere, but you can’t always reply from within Yahoo Messenger or Mail so that your reply appears back in the original service. If you want to respond to a friend’s Tweet, you can IM them back with a copy of their Tweet attached, but you can’t simply generate a new Tweet in response like any Twitter client could.
It’s not really status-casting, or whatever you want to call it, unless you can broadcast your status back across non-Yahoo services.
(Photo credit: Flickr/Andrew Sea)
wow… yahoo is just catching onto this huh? best of luck to them on it
Nice thing is, JS-Kit Echo already supports this and shares items with your Yahoo Friends via this new feature
“status-casting.” In both Yahoo Mail and Messenger 10, you can update your status and all of your contacts who also use either of those two products can see your updates. It doesn’t appear to be a two-way connection
>>>>> This appears to be a good feature, by now it is easy to update information regarding all social media through Yahoo. But the update seems static as its a one -way connection. If it provides an option to update from Yahoo Mail or messenger to original service dynamically, it would be great.
Please stop writing about yahoo… the company is a has been.. it is like listening to someone talk about Kmart…. They destroyed their brand. Just like Walmart made kmart second rate so did google make Yahoo second rate and Yahoo confirmed it by selling or shutting down half its products.
200 Million users makes them VERY relevant – don’t believe the hype
hype… what hype… other than boss API I cringe when anything is linked to yahoo… signing up for a yahoo account is a pain in the ass… and how many of those users are like me who long ago gave it a look but can’t stand the service… as for 200 million users well a % of the population is stupid… 200 mil sounds right…
how do you call a service w/ 300 million users a has been? for a lot of people who probably don’t read TC (or, you might argue, don’t read any real news) Yahoo is still the center of their online life.
I know and I make fun of them.. it is like having a hotmail account.. I am like are you stupid…. do you want people to make fun of you?
you are must be leet you have gmail and twitter.
“I measure my intelligence by what email address I have.” Come on, its email.
It is a has been when it comes to innovative technology. But the rest of the company–it’s content network, etc…not so much. And they’re going to buy more blogs that are highly relevant to our culture this year.
i wish i could filter updates (by group of friends, by source, by date, etc) on the new messenger… right now it’s just a list of updates, and for someone with about 300 hundred contacts on my msg list, there’s a lot of irrelevant updates…
ah, and of course, i wish i could twitter from messenger, at the very least in response to a twitter posted by a contact (showing on the Updates tab)…
Grandma: Merry Christmas, Johnny.
Johnny: Thanks, Grandma. Wha’d’ ya get me?
Grandma: We got you a Yahoo account, so you can status-cast Grandpa and I every day.
Johnny: Ah, Gee, Grandma, I’m already on Goog . . .
Mom: Shhhh….
I like the mail and the messenger of yahoo.
I wish yahoo messenger give me much more pleasure.
Yahoo messenger can love you long time if you would only give it a chance.
Why don’t you and Yahoo messenger get a chat room.
Excellent. So maybe in the year 2024, Yahoo will realize that people want to keep their user@domain address and don’t want to sign up for wil287378803782@yahoo.com? Nah, I don’t think so. Yahoo was always stuburn…
yahoo needs to give up the ghost on this, anyone who wanted to be on facebook signed up three years ago. there’s practically no one left in the US who wants this feature but hasn’t committed to fb and/or twitter.
yahoo mail still doesn’t support imap. they need to stop with all these fake features and just commit to the features people have been requesting for years.
this company is doomed to “reinvent” itself every six months as it gets more and more irrelevant
This one was long coming
it’s about time!