"Yahoo! Mail and Messenger are available as separate streamlined apps, however they offer common features that will give you a better mobile communications experience that’s easy to use and immediately familiar," says Yahoo Mail Product Manager Lee Parry. "Both apps let you compose messages with rich text, express yourself through our many Yahoo! emoticons, access Yahoo! Address Book and phone contacts, as well as share photos that you’ve taken on your phone."

"The Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger Android apps offer many of the core features that you find in their PC counterparts," adds Perry. "In the Yahoo! Mail Android app, you can search for important messages with our Full Search and Smart Folders features and organize messages into the same personal folders you use on the PC. In Messenger you can set your Yahoo! Messenger status message, view the status messages of your buddy list contacts and chat with your MSN/Windows Live Messenger friends."

The apps can be downloaded from the Android Market on devices that support Android 2.0 and higher.

"While Messenger for iPhone is relatively new, for many connecting with Messenger friends on your mobile phone is not new," says Microsoft’s Michael Chang.  "In addition to the more than one million iPhone Messenger users, there are over 24 million people who connect with Messenger friends from other mobile phones through a client application, their phone’s browser, or SMS."

"Along with Messenger Connect, Messenger IM in Hotmail, and the coming integration with Xbox LIVE, the new iPhone app is just one more way that we are bringing Messenger to you across the web and on your phone," adds Chang.

Last week, MySpace announced its own new integration with Windows Live Messenger (as well as Hotmail). That said, the popularity of the app could be a good thing for MySpace as well as Microsoft.

Microsoft says it will be updating the app shortly, in order to address some issues users have complained about.

"Goober, besides Skype, is the only company offering versatile and flexible flatrates," a Goober representative tells WebProNews. "The flatrate prices are about the same as Skype’s while the per minute rates are drastically lower."

"Goober 1minute US calls cost for example, 1 cent compared to Skype’s 2.1cent; other countries are around 1.4 cents/minute, but that only occurs in 10% of all calls like if you call an Indian reservation in Cheyenne J On average the per minute prices are between 25% – 50% below Skype’s per minute rates,’ she says. "Overall goober is about 50% cheaper than Skype in the US and Canada because the 1 cent rate is used in 90% of all calls."

If you want to know what sets Goober apart from other instant message apps, "It’s the Webfolder were you have online access to your files and were you can upload files or for example images to a gallery, while you’re on the road," the rep tells us. "The next version of goober IM for the iPhone will be multi-protocol, meaning you can chat from goober IM people using other IMs like Google or Yahoo.  The goober IM on the web already supports multi-protocol messaging, btw."

Both applications are available now to download for free from the iTunes App Store, searching the keyword "goober."

Original Article: Yahoo Messenger Version 10 is now available in beta. New features include enhanced video calling, courtesy of GIPS, friend updates from Yahoo, Flickr, Twitter, and others through the new updates view, and improved language support.

GIPS has provided the underlying voice technology for Yahoo Messenger for the last three years. Now GIPS is providing its VideoEngine to add the video element to the messenger.

"With the launch of Yahoo! Messenger 10, we’re allowing people to instantly communicate with friends and family around the world through new interactive and social features like video calls," says Dave Merriwether, senior director of Yahoo! Messenger. "The GIPS VideoEngine enables us to provide the Yahoo! Messenger community with the best video experience possible. Now people can enjoy full-screen, face-to-face chats with friends and family at no cost, in the familiar Yahoo! Messenger environment." 

"Yahoo! Messenger is the leading communication platform that provides people with the greatest choice to stay connected to one another through text IM, PC-based calling, mobile text messaging and now video calling," says Emerick Woods, GIPS’ CEO. “"We’re proud to work with Yahoo! to deliver a truly differentiated high quality video experience for the hundreds of millions of people on Yahoo! Messenger around the world."

On a semi-related note, Google just recently launched a new voice/video chat application for the iGoogle homepage. You can read more about that here.
 

Related Articles:

> Yahoo Will No Longer Support Old Versions of Messenger

> Yahoo Messenger iPhone App Introduced

> Yahoo Messenger Adds Social Features

A spokesperson for Microsoft shared some interesting findings with WebProNews from a survey about Windows Live Messenger: 

 - 71 percent of Americans surveyed have accidentally IMed the wrong person in the past year.

-  More than half (59 percent) of Americans surveyed say they’ve shared important news, such as an engagement or promotion, via IM in the past year.

-  Nearly a quarter (21 percent) of Americans surveyed use Messenger during business meetings; of those people, roughly 83 percent say they IM "fairly often" during meetings to make after-work plans.

-  Even though approximately half [49 percent] of Americans surveyed use the lingo ‘ROFL’ (Rolling on the Floor Laughing) while IMing, one-third of those surveyed would have no idea what ROFL meant if it was IMed to them.

- Now that’s a lot of talk!:  In 2000, there were 1 million active Messenger conversations happening at any given time. Today, there are roughly 40 million simultaneous Messenger conversations.

"Microsoft is committed to continue investing in Messenger and meeting the demands of the large customer base," the spokesperson said. "After listening to customer feedback, Windows Live Messenger added new features in the past year that help Messenger customers communicate and stay in touch with the people they care about most, including simple photo sharing, integration of third-party social networks like Facebook and Flickr, groups to organize your contacts, rich voice and video conversations, and more."

To celebrate Windows Live Messenger’s 10th anniversary, Microsoft is giving users celebratory emoticons, display pics and "winks." Starting at 4pm today, users can download the gift and preview key moments in Messenger’s history here.

Our parents, perhaps yours told you, there was concern when the calculator was invented. Dang kids would never learn to do proper math. And yet here we are in a world that produced the complicated math behind Google’s algorithms, and, perhaps more importantly, a world that can crunch the calculations of universal truths expected to come from smashing subatomic particles together.

One imagines that when the wheel was invented, village elders worried young people would become too lazy to survive. Look at them hauling so much stuff! And so quickly! Who could possibly use all of it? My father could carry all that in his arms anyway, from here up into the mountains, up hill both ways in the snow, and he took the time to appreciate and understand the things he carried, never wasted or dropped a thing. Next they’ll be attaching those things to horses, you watch.

A second study indicating that texting may have positive effects on kids’ reading and writing skills is about to be published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. Though many of us have protested against the popularity of modern abbreviated cyber quasi-speak—omg, ur nt srius ok cu 2nite—via text messaging and IM, viewing it as some affront to the English language, we may have been a bit curmudgeonly about the whole thing.

Though the authors of the study, hailing from Coventry University, stopped short of conclusively stating texting actually improved kids’ language skills, they did find a positive association between the frequency of texting and language test scores. Why? Maybe some good old phonics, maybe a little of something else.

“…we found associations between textism use and phonological awareness," wrote the researchers in their report. "What is most important, the extent of the children’s textism use was able to predict significant variance in their word reading ability[...] This suggests that children’s use of textisms is not only positively associated with word reading ability, but that it may be contributing to reading development in a way that goes beyond simple phonologically based explanations."   

The study’s timing is interesting because it is released amid the loud squalling of a well-known British neuroscientist, promoting her book, concluding—without, according to some who’ve read it, any real evidence to back it up—that the new generation of “screen people” will be markedly inferior to the previous generation of “book people.”

Something tells me, though, these kids will grow up to do some remarkable, now unfathomable things, and there’ll be a new batch of geezers snarling at how kids these days are rotting their minds with [fill in new technological advancement here]. 

The latest such issue is with Twitter instant message functionality, which is being removed completely. After dealing with problem after problem with various aspects of this, Twitter has decided to just pull the plug on it (at least temporarily). In other words, they’ve moved it off of the "Things That are Broken list" and onto the "Things We Want to Build list," as Twitter Co-founder and CPO Evan Williams puts it. On the Twitter Status blog, he writes:

 We first killed AIM support after struggling for months to make it reliable (which was a side-project to trying to keep the service as a whole reliable). And our Jabber support has been up and down until about four-and-a-half months ago when it’s just been…down.

We’ve been unclear about its status and what to expect; I want to clarify that now.

First: I know a lot of people love this feature. I’ve heard personally from many folks who say it’s critical for their enjoyment of Twitter. So it kills me that we haven’t been able to deliver on this consistently. And the bad news is, we don’t have a quick fix.

Rather than continuing to deliver a flawed product, they’re not going to deliver the product at all until it’s flawless, from my understanding. In the meantime, Williams suggests using excia.im, a third-party application built using the Twitter API, that describes itself as "a jabber bot that allows you to update your twitter status very simply."

Corvida at Read Write Web notes, however that "Excla.im does not allow you to see your friends updates (yet)." Twitter is welcoming other third parties to roll out IM solutions, so I would imagine we’ll see more popping up before long.

Here’s what’s really going on:

1. Google doesn’t mind this deal going through at all. Google knows they will be able to outrun a “Microhoo.” Why do they know that? Because they’ve been able to outrun them both separately. As I said on Channel 5 news on Friday night: put two turkeys together and you don’t get an eagle.

2. Google stands to gain HUGE by slowing down this deal. Every month longer that this deal takes is tens of millions in Google’s pockets. Why? Well, the real race today isn’t for search. Isn’t for email. Isn’t for IM. It’s for ownership of your mobile phone. I met the guy who runs China’s telecom last week in Davos. He’s seeing six million new people get a cell phone in China every month. So, every month that Microsoft and Yahoo will be stuck in some courtroom arguing out why this is a good deal means money in the bank for Google as they close mobile phone deal after mobile phone deal.

3. Email is not where the money is. Google knows this. So, who cares that Microsoft and Yahoo have a monopoly there? There’s only one way to make money with the 600 million who are on either Microsoft’s Hotmail or Yahoo’s email: get them to join other services where there ARE ways to make money. Danny Sullivan told me that this deal is all about search. He’s right. But you gotta be able to get those 600 million people to not just use your email, but come over and use your search. Google is trying to slow down these teams from doing that. But Google knows that even if Microsoft and Yahoo join email and do a pretty decent job of integrating search into there that Google will still see more growth in both email and search than Microsoft and Yahoo together will see. Why? Have you compared Google’s offerings to the others? I have (I am a Hotmail user). Even though I am locked into Hotmail cause my email address is all over the Web I’d rather be on Gmail and Google’s offerings are better integrated and better designed.

4. IM is harder to monetize than email is. Do we really think Google is concerned about either email or IM? If they were they’d be pouring lots of resources into Gmail and Google Talk. Hint: Google isn’t doing that. Why not? Because they aren’t taking their eye off the mobile ball. They are hoping that everyone else does, though, by sending this note. It sure did work, too. Damn the bloggers all took the bait and either called Google arrogant or hypocritical or annoying. Google is all of those things here, for sure, but they are damn smart and are doing this for their own purposes.

Now, we can argue about whether this deal is good or not, or whether it’ll work out for Microsoft or not, but people, don’t take your eye off of what Google is really up to here. Google is having fun by causing Microsoft to react, not to mention that if its little note is taken seriously this deal will be slowed down by six months or more while government regulators look it over. Even in the best of situations it’s going to take a year for these two huge companies to integrate and figure out how to work with each other. So, every month that this gets delayed is gold in Google’s pockets.

Comments

Jeff Bonforte announced the launch on Yahoo’s official blog. He noted how he made his honeymoon trip to Southeast Asia without bringing along a laptop, since he could use the new messenger service at any Internet cafe.

(We might suggest bringing a laptop along on a honeymoon isn’t the most enlightened choice a newlywed groom could make anyway. Are there a lot of brides out there who feel a romantic rush at the words “Internet cafe?” We’re skeptical here.)

Bonforte said this is the first brand-new messenger in over six years. He’s particularly enamored with message history and the emoticon picker. As a new launch, the service has the familiar ‘beta’ tag attached to it.

Messenger for the Web does IM only. Voice and video are still exclusive to the downloadable version of Yahoo Messenger. It’s a small tradeoff to make for having Yahoo’s chat available everywhere.

Yahoo’s familiar login process brings up the Messenger for the Web screen, with the buddy list displayed. Launching a chat session opens the interface for IM, and multiple sessions will be available under different tabs.

The product fills a gap that AOL, MSN, and even Google had addressed by enabling web-based IM for their users. It’s a nice looking service that works as it is meant to from a wide range of web browsers. Bonforte has promised more announcements about Web Messenger, so perhaps we will see them incorporate voice or video in the future.

So why do I use instant messaging to talk to colleagues and contacts? Well… because it’s instant.

Consequently, when I saw an AOL poll touting that instant messaging is more popular among the teen and young adult ranks of Internet users, I was hardly surprised. In fact, our own Jason Lee Miller touted similar findings almost a year ago resulting from a similar study.

Think about it; the color of the sky, the presence and impact of gravity, Elton John’s sexual orientation… some things you just know without having to be told, right?

I thought so, until I ran across a blog post Toni Carr, SEO enthusiast and mother, bemoaning the ever-growing generational messaging gap:

So perhaps the perceived gap isn’t as obvious to those on the other side of it as I had originally suspected.

Nevertheless, this is just another wrinkle in the scheme of the habitual behavior that contextual marketers are going to have to pay close attention to in developing advertising campaigns geared toward a multi-generational online audience.

Let’s take a fictional company, Ithilien Productions, and examine a scenario in which information pulled from these studies can be framed with some amount of relevancy.

As an up and coming independent film studio, Ithilien has worked hard to secure the best and brightest of rising thespian talent, and as a result has produced two films this year that were critically acclaimed at the Cannes and Sundance film festivals. Subsequently, major motion picture distribution looms on the horizon.

Girls Night Out is a cautionary tale of teen female angst and depression laden with satirical views of body image, emotional instability, and parental misguidance. The second release, The Crying Tree, documents the life of two strangers who find themselves inexorably connected by a series of events that take place in a small Midwestern town.

So, understanding the importance of relevancy, Ithilien chooses to place ads for Girls Night Out with AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger, while running spots for The Crying Tree in pages associated with Yahoo! Mail and MSN Hotmail, marketing the youthful movie to the teens, and the mature film to the older adult crowd.

Welcome to the new world of contextual advertising.

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Joe is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.