At left, Yahoo's Pingbox application on my Facebook page. At right, the resulting instant message chat through Yahoo Messenger. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)SUNNYVALE, Calif.--Facebook has a Web-based instant-messaging application, but Yahoo wants to one-up the social networking site with an application called Pingbox that lets Facebook users chat with widely used Yahoo Messenger technology instead.
In 2008, Yahoo released a version of Pingbox that would let people put an IM widget on their pages at Friendster, Xanga, hi5, LiveJournal, MySpace, and Google's Blogger sites. It was harder work to build the Pingbox application for Facebook but now that's available too.
With Pingbox set up, anyone who visits your Facebook page sees a chat window that invites them to send a message. Doing so initiates a chat through Yahoo Messenger--but you have to be using Messenger version 8.1 or the current 9.0.
Facebook has its own instant-messaging service, but it doesn't launch a pop-up window or desktop notification when somebody sends a message, so it's not obvious when people use it.
"We realized you could have Facebook sitting in a tab all day long and you'll never notice whether they IM you," Samir Mehta, senior product messenger on Yahoo Messenger Team, said in an interview at Yahoo's headquarters here.
Samir Mehta
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)My testing of Pingbox showed it works as advertised. Setting it up was easy enough, and after doing so a "facebook pingbox" group appeared in my Yahoo Messenger contacts list. When initiating a chat, Pingbox asked me to identify myself, and that username appeared in the Pingbox group on Yahoo Messenger.
There is a limitation to the Facebook application compared with the other versions, though. Because Facebook doesn't run Flash applications automatically, visitors to the must manually click the application to start it.
One interesting element of Pingbox is that messages can only be seen in Yahoo Messenger, not other services such as Digsby, Meebo, Trillian, or Pidgin. "We don't interoperate with third parties. You have to be using one of our clients," Mehta said.
That's a drag for those of us who have to reckon with multiple non-interoperable instant messaging networks. But it probably makes sense for Yahoo as it tries to wire its Internet properties together socially. Yahoo Messenger is one key communications hub, and it's a component of the Yahoo Open Strategy.
The setup process requires you to authenticate yourself on Yahoo's network. After that, it lets you set a color scheme and welcome message, then offers a choice of a smaller or larger version for your Facebook page. The trickiest part: after you save your settings, be sure to actually activate it by clicking the button in the yellow bar at the top of the screen labeled "Add Yahoo Messenger Pingbox to your profile."
Yahoo has begun showing advertisements within instant messenger chat windows.
(Credit: CNET News)Updated 4 p.m. PST with further Yahoo comment.
Yahoo Messenger (Windows | Mac) long has shown ads on its buddy list window, but the Internet pioneer is testing them in the instant-messaging chat windows as well.
The ads are part of a test that began in August and ends in December, Yahoo said in a statement. One example we saw here at CNET shows an ad for MasterCard.
"Ads in Yahoo Messenger will allow us to put even more resources behind developing and delivering valuable free features and services," Yahoo said. "Yahoo Messenger is a free service to our users, and our goal is to provide a useful and relevant experience while ensuring this is a profitable business for Yahoo. Yahoo is inherently an advertising-driven business."
The company wouldn't comment yet on what happens after the test is finished. "Plans will be made when the testing is concluded," the company said.
Yahoo laid off 1,520 employees last week and is in the midst of a review of all its business units to see which should be preserved. The company is under fierce financial pressure that only got worse with the recession and increasingly gloomy forecasts for online advertising.
Google shows ads in Gmail that are selected on the basis of e-mail content, but the Yahoo IM ads aren't selected on the basis of context, Yahoo said.
"The ad shows at most once per day per user and scrolls away" as an IM conversation continues, Yahoo said. "Right now the ads are being tested in versions of Yahoo Messenger 7.0 and above."
Updated on 9/24/08 at 12:00 pm with more details on the Pingbox feature. Updated on 9/23/08 at 5:40 pm to correct information on photo-sharing and Pingbox, and adds details about contact-importing.
Yahoo Messenger 9.0 became available on Tuesday for Windows XP--a week after Yahoo's target launch date and interestingly, a week after Microsoft released its beta update of Windows Live Messenger. Yahoo Messenger 9.0 as dramatic an update of its instant messenger as Windows Live beta is of Windows Live Messenger 8.5, and it introduces some pleasant improvements over version 8.1 that will satisfy Yahoo loyalists. Among them are a redesigned interface with more skins, more space, and the excellent ability to see scaled public images and videos in the chat window.
If you're familiar with the beta version of Yahoo Messenger 9.0, this final build adds more conspicuous spam alerts and the ability to chat with friends directly from their Web site or online profile page. We'll discuss both later on in this review.
Interface
A bolder, more spread-out display graces Yahoo Messenger 9.0, complete with larger avatar thumbnails and room to read a contact's status message. Also new, Yahoo now updates your status with your recent activity on Yahoo's Buzz, Avatars, 360, or MyBlogLog--for example, when you change your avatar's outfit. Those who can't get used to the new spacing can revert to the familiar compact view.
A visual picker makes previewing and switching skins nearly automatic.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Importing contacts by bulk from a wide array of services is another biggie feature that makes its debut in Yahoo Messenger 9.0. The importer, operated by TrueSwitch, scours your other IM, e-mail, and social networking accounts--including Gmail and Facebook--for friends that are also signed up on Yahoo IM. TrueSwitch will send requests on your behalf for friends to add you to their Messenger accounts, and you'll have the option of inviting your unaffiliated contacts to join up with Yahoo.
Other changes include new skins, including a dark theme, which you'll find by clicking the button to the right of the Messenger logo. Windows Live Messenger beta took skins a step further with themes that incorporate background images; while some Windows Live scenes are very nice, Yahoo's visual picker saves you an extra step when choosing a new look.
Like Windows Live Messenger beta, Yahoo Messenger's contact search bar finds buddies quickly by checking your IM list and your Yahoo address book. In another similarity, Yahoo Messenger's status field supports emoticons and links. Finally, Yahoo Messenger 9.0 highlights power users with an icon of a medal or crown placed next to their name (your choice) and rewards them with more avatar accessories and priority customer care.
Chat window
The Yahoo Messenger 9.0 chat window looks a little more airbrushed than in version 8.1, but the biggest difference is also the best--a feature that embeds scaled maps, images, video players, and public photos when you or a friend drops in a link ending in .jpg, .gif, .png, or .bmp.
Being able to comment on photos and watch YouTube videos without leaving the IM window is a treat, and something no other instant messaging client currently offers. While Windows Live Messenger beta can boast about its fun feature for mapping certain profile pictures to common emoticons (like happy, sad, and winking), being able to reference your IM window when you're chatting about a photo or video is more useful overall.
Yahoo Messenger 9.0 can embed videos and image URLs directly into the chat window.
(Credit: CNET Networks)If you're a fan of emoticons, Yahoo's new Messenger 9.0 adds six new expressions to version 8.1's gallery, including a smiling head giving a thumbs-up and a little guy rocking out. Yahoo has heeded the advice of beta testers and stopped using dime-size emoticons that, while easier to see, were also less defined around the edges. Although we also prefer the traditional smiley faces, as long as Yahoo has that gallery of larger images on hand, the emoticons' display size ought to be the user's choice. The behavior of Yahoo Messenger's IM window otherwise remains the same.
Spam control
IMers plagued with spam messages (also called spim) will appreciate some small alterations in 9.0. The warning message on a conversation window is bolder, for one, and Yahoo has added a button to the offline message window that lets you report the impostor message without having to leave Yahoo Messenger.
Pingbox is a Yahoo chat window embedded into a personal site or profile.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Yahoo Messenger Pingbox
Pingbox is a brand-new feature in Yahoo Messenger that lets Web site owners and visitors chat in real time. If you're a blogger, eBay seller, or social networking buff, you can embed a Yahoo Pingbox chat window into your page to chat with visitors to your site in real time. The visitor sees the chat window on your site and you see conversation windows when you're logged on to Yahoo Messenger. We can see how this could be beneficial for users who want to engage a Web site owner on the fly, especially if chatting means you're not waiting around for an e-mail. Thankfully, the service is opt-in for visitors, who need to make the first move before the Pingbox owner sees their presence.
On the owner's end, Pingboxes are highly customizable, with controls for the message window's look, for broadcasting a welcome message, and for shutting off any or all communication features if visitors' pings grow too overwhelming. While chatting with site visitors isn't new, Yahoo has definitely brought weight to the service with their online Pingbox creation wizard.
Yahoo Messenger 9.0 has one or two rough edges, the same niggles we've had about previous versions--the heavy advertising of other Yahoo services and the bundled Yahoo Toolbar. However, these are small complaints compared to the high quality of the chat app. The visual improvements and the ability to share multimedia within the chat screen are no-brainer reasons to upgrade.
That said, Yahoo Messenger 9.0 beta isn't the only chat application making inroads. You might also want to compare it with Windows Live Messenger beta, the biggest IM network threat to Yahoo's desktop messenger, or to Trillian, Digsby beta, or Pidgin--all competing desktop apps that also let you chat with friends on other networks.
For more than a decade, the Internet has suffered from multiple incompatible communication standards for instant messaging. Now it looks like Yahoo, one of the major IM players, is open to breaking the logjam.
I'm a power user of IM who struggles to find software that supports chatting with people on the four main IM networks: AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. Today's situation, for me at least, is like having to own four e-mail programs for different networks or four telephones for incompatible phone systems.
So I was encouraged by words from Scott Dietzen, Yahoo's new head of communications products including Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail. That promotion expanded his turf from his previous position at the helm of the Zimbra online e-mail software start-up that Yahoo acquired last year.
Zimbra, like Google and some other non-incumbent powers in the world of instant messaging, has used the open XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) standard for instant messaging. It's this standard that Dietzen apparently sees playing a broader role at Yahoo.
"I believe XMPP is the right platform through which to deliver interoperability with at least some of our partners," Dietzen said in an interview.
No doubt one of those partners would be Google. Generally, it's one of Yahoo's biggest rivals, but Google became a major partner in a search-ad deal with Yahoo announced in June. A sidelight to the deal was one line saying the companies would make their IM services interoperable. It's hard to say at this stage, though, how far Yahoo or others might go.
One-time deals or standards?
As I see it, there are two basic paths to IM interoperability. The first, which we've been on for some time, consists of one-off technology partnerships between various networks. For example, Microsoft and Yahoo's IM services now can link together, and the Google Web-based IM service built into Gmail works with AIM.
But that approach only truly works as long as all networks set up partnerships with all other networks--a combinatorics nightmare given the arrival of new IM services from companies such as MySpace, Facebook, and eBay's Skype. That's where the second approach--using a standard--comes in handy.
E-mail previously had assorted closed communities including America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, and the Internet itself. The standard prevalent on the latter network, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) won out in the long run. It's got shortcomings--for example identity authentication issues that contribute to the spam and security problems--but those problems arguably are easier to fix with one standard than many.
Standards move notoriously slowly, of course, especially when compared with the rest of the technology industry. But the Internet has reached a scale where IM incompatibilities have major consequences that retard innovation, too. Standards might hamper the development of new IM features, but I believe interoperability problems are denying us a broader, richer world of real-time online communication.
XMPP or SIP?
So if the IM powers want to move to IM standards, the next question is which standard to use.
Here, too, Dietzen has an opinion. When I asked him what's been holding back IM interoperability, he had this to offer: "There are two competing potential standards, XMPP and...SIP. If I were betting, I'd bet on XMPP emerging as the likely framework for adoption."
SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol, grew out of the world of telephony and is more oriented toward multimedia than straight text.
But XMPP looks to have an inside track among the incumbent IM powers. For one thing, Yahoo's Zimbra software framework supports it, Dietzen said.
For another, Yahoo opted to use XMPP in its Yahoo Live experimental video service, according to Process One, a Parisian company that sells XMPP-based IM server software using the open-source ejabberd software.
And there are signs others might be interested, too. Earlier this year, AOL began experimenting with an XMPP interface to its AIM and ICQ networks for instant messaging.
So perhaps there's an end in sight for this particular Tower of Babel. Adopting a standard means the IM networks will have to let go of some control, but if done right, it also could mean instant messaging could become a more popular, active, and useful part of the Internet.
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