Yahoo Adds IM To Mail
Yahoo has started integrating Yahoo Messenger into Yahoo Mail, just like Google did with Gmail over a year ago. Because of Yahoo’s cool tabbed IM interface, the IM window is full size, supersized even, making for lots of room for avatars, rich text editing controls, and timestamps.
I’m not sure how integrated it is in Yahoo Mail and how it compares to Gmail Chat, but it’s interesting to see this becoming a trend. I wonder if Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail, which is full of advanced functionality and is on a platform known for advanced web interfaces, is planning IM integration, and if they’ve got some cool ideas on how to do it. LiveSide seems to indicate that there will be an upgrade there this summer.
Also, Google has released a cool AJAX news bar that websites can use to display news headlines and excerpts. You pick some keywords and choose a format, either a thin bar with changing headlines or a substantial sidebar chunk that changes tabs of news stories complete with excerpts, and get an easy bar, or you can heavily customize the code to do all sorts of cool things.
Glad I disabled Talk integration in Gmail. Meh, I hate this kind of intrusive integration (though I love them for making it a mere option now
).
The AJAX bar is cool. I noticed it changes the story when you move your mouse over it.
But then the bar went totally crazy for me: when I switched back to its tab, it didn’t stop alternating between stories, resulting in me having to read it when it was still switching the story ten times a second >_>
So, um, yeah.
Comment by Tim | February 22, 2007
I disabled Gtalk in my Gmail. Why would I use it within Gmail if I already have Meebo?
I wish Gmail would steal Yahoo Mail’s tab function, which is very useful. Perhaps some Greasemonkey hacker should come up with a script for it.
Comment by Hashim | February 22, 2007