Yahoo Messenger in Mail and Google AJAX News Bar

By Nathan Weinberg

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.

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