YIM

MSN / Yahoo

by alec on October 12, 2005

I just tuned into the conference call on the MSN / Yahoo Interop Agreement that was announced this morning.  The salient details?  In six to nine months users of both networks will have text, voice, emoticon and presence interoperability, creating a community of 250 million users globally.

Jeff Pulver asks does it mean anything?  Only to the extent that it presages large interoperable networks built on SIP/SIMPLE, in his opinion.

Om Malik is clearly unimpressed.  His delightful strikeouts say it all:

They way I see it – for Microsoft this is a vital move especially from an enterprise perspective. The more interoperable they become, the more valuable their Live Communication Server becomes. Thanks to Dare for clarifying that. A full press release and the conference call later, it is all about the consumer.

Yahoo IM is already interoperable with LCS, Om.

My take?

These are the basic services for any kind of Voice 2.0 application — presence, text, voice.  Microsoft, anyway, has a commitment to SIP, as I have written previously.  Today, Yahoo has little in the way of API support for IM, and Microsoft only marginally more. To the extent that both companies continue to create developer opportunities around these platforms, this interoperability announcement could be a huge benefit to the industry.  Microsoft’s recent reorg leaves me hopeful that is their direction. A clear sign of this intent would be to publish APIs for presence, test messaging and call control.

The race is on.  Skype is already miles ahead, with as large a community of users, a commitment to support third party applications, and a larger community of developers.

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MSN / Yahoo Alliance

by alec on October 11, 2005

Andy Abramson, CNET, the Seattle PI, and the Wall Street Journal report that MSN and Yahoo will announce an alliance allowing IM users to communicate between networks.  From the WSJ Story:

In a competitive realignment of the heated Internet industry, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are expected to announce Wednesday that consumers using their free communications services — including instant messaging and computer-to-computer voice calling — will be able to communicate directly with each other for the first time, say people familiar with the matter. he expected linkup of Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s communications services would immediately challenge the leading instant-messaging market share of Time Warner Inc.’s America Online unit. AOL has a 56% market share world-wide, according to research firm Radicati Group Inc. It has long resisted letting users of other instant-messaging services connect with its own. A combined Yahoo and Microsoft could command 44% of the global instant-messaging market, according to Radicati.

What does this mean, if anything, for the talks that have been ongoing with AOL?  Perhaps nothing.  AOL still has valuable content, and Microsoft still has a more richly developed platform. 

As Andy speculated, it may be the beginnings of the first large, interoperable SIP networks for voice.  When I visited MSN 18 months ago, then architect Peter Ford told me that MSN Messenger was moving toward SIP, but it would be a gradual process.  IF AOL were to also join the party, there would be a market of nearly 100 million voice enabled IM users — more than Skype.

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