Yahoo messenger has finally been ajaxified and the new avatar of the most widely used desktop IM client in india(my assumption) can be found at
http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/
I am assuming that it is the most widely used IM client in India because people were not onto the Hotmail and msn bandwagon because of the slow crawling dial up speeds that were available at that point of time and yahoo became a darling to the thousands of Indians online at that point of time.
Yahoo is losing this edge now to Google and most of the people (including me)have made our gmail accounts as the final frontier in managing a mailbox.Well I am not surprised that yahoo came out with a web version of their most used service after their free email service off course (Again my assumption) and rumors were ripe some months back that yahoo was going to acquire meebo but I guess these deal didnt see the day of light.
Now here we are with yahoo’s own version of ajaxified IM client well I am perplexed by yahoo’s use of flash as a platform for this rather then building one using plain old javascript and ajax technologies build on top of their popular open source yui library.
Well I did login and use the service it is pretty neat I must say since it is very simple to use and nice clean interface and easy to use and explore and also the colours are easy on the eyes (even though I am a bit disappointed with the whole purple theme that yahoo has going now for them i would love to see some more vibrant colours the purple colour is giving them a funeral kinda look and it goes well with the state there are in now )
And one of the most fun feature that I liked in yahoo messenger was the feature of leaving offline messages and am glad that yahoo has carried this useful little feature in the ajaxified version of yahoo messenger too.
Well this is one of the new cool offerings from yahoo considering that most of the yahoo users are now in the corp world and that they are on networks where they no longer have privileges of installing desktop applications on their office pc’s and this will give them access to their yahoo pals. I was sad that this offering from yahoo did not create much buzz in the blogosphere and it is a shame that a decent offering from yahoo goes unnoticed and a Google’s april fools joke is giving a wide coverage well that goes to show that the new darling of the media is Google and not Yahoo.
I am really hoping that Yahoo gets it groove back their ability to innovate is almost dead well I guess the first thing is drop the purple gloomy colour and go vibrant and then look at the consumer offerings and see where they have missed out in recent times (they have missed out on a whole lot) but I guess after the colour change they need management change and then they have to rejuvenate their employees and wake them from their sleep and motivate them to come up with gd stuff
Also the other thing you will notice is a .php extension to the page when you login to the webmessenger which is a first for me since i have known for a long time that they have replaced their old yscript with php for some time now but this is one of the rare occasions that they say openly(via the browser address bar hahahaha) if u do a search you will find lots of presentations by Yahoo and its employees on php and mysql and how it is being used at Yahoo