WebProNews

Yahoo Will No Longer Support Old Versions of Messenger

A while back, Yahoo announced it would be retiring old versions of Yahoo Messenger - versions 6.0 through 7.5. They have now set a date for it at the end of the month - September, 30. Yahoo Messenger users who are using anything older than 8.0 will no longer be able to sign in and use the service. Obviously, that means it's time to upgrade, if you still intend to use Yahoo for your instant messaging.

Google Releases Instant Messaging API

Google has announced the release of a new API for building Talk bots on top of Google App Engine, Google's product that lets developers create and host web apps on the Google infrastructure.

Yahoo to Launch Arabic Versions of its Properties

Yahoo has announced its intent to acquire Maktoob.com, an Arab portal that reaches one in every three people online in its region. That accounts for about 16.5 million people. Yahoo says this is its largest geographic expansion in years.

Yahoo Messenger Goes Video with New Version

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.

Microsoft Celebrates Ten Years of Windows Live Messenger

Tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger. Microsoft says it has become the most widely used free instant messaging service in the world, with 330 million users. A spokesperson for Microsoft shared some interesting findings with WebProNews from a survey about Windows Live Messenger: 

IBM, MIT Attach Dollar Signs To Online Connections

Two very reputable organizations - IBM Research and MIT's Sloan School of Management - recently collaborated on a report that's in part titled "Value of Social Network."  And managers and employees everywhere should know that, according to said organizations, social networks can be quite valuable indeed.

Yahoo Messenger iPhone App Introduced

Yahoo announced today that the Yahoo Messenger app for the iPhone has arrived. It is free of charge and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store.

Facebook Apps Get More Social with Chat

Facebook has launched the ability to let users chat within applications on Facebook. This keeps applications within the social network even more social. If a developer uses the new fb:chat-invite FBML tag, they can display a list of users' online friends and let them invite their friends to chat. Developers can also give users the freedom to choose which friends they want to appear in their chat lists within the apps.

Chatting from Your Google Homepage

Gmail chat has come to iGoogle. This means users will be able to chat with their friends and associates without leaving the comfort of their Google homepage. The feature is not a gadget like most of your iGoogle features. The chat feature comes in the form of a sidebar and resides below the left-hand navigation menu.

Meebo Gets Facebook Back

UPDATE: Meebo has now announced that Facebook is back on. Seth at the Meebo Blog writes: After some hard work from the folks here at Meebo and help from a whole host of people at Facebook, we now have Facebook back in Meebo. Plus, Meebo is now the first launch partner of the “alpha” version of the Facebook Connect + Chat integration. That’s pretty cool.