Facebook recently rolled out a new home page interface that displays a select list of the user’s friends along the vertical length of the right side of the screen. It makes it easy to see when these friends are available …

Google has a new Google Labs experiment out called Talk Guru. Google describes it as: Application intended for chat (IM) users, including users using chat clients on low-end phones, allowing them to answer simple web queries from the context of …

Research in Motion (RIM) is planning to make its popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) available on Android and iOS platforms. What’s RIM thinking, and how will a cross-platform BBM impact your enterprise? BBM offers immediate gratification and exclusivity While RIM made …

Yahoo has launched Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger apps for Android. These are the first Android apps Yahoo has ever offered.

Microsoft launched its Windows Live Messenger app for the iphone last week. Today, the company has announced that in only five days, the app was downloaded by over a million people.

MySpace has announced integration with Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail. The beta integration is rolling out to mutual users of the two services starting today.

"By integrating core features of both platforms, users will be able to discover what their friends are doing online through photos and the activity stream across social networks," says MySpace’s Manu Rekhi.

Steve Ballmer just previewed the new Windows Live Messenger beta during his "Five Dimensions of Cloud Computing" speech to students at the Universidade de Sao Paulo in Brazil. Windows Live Messenger has over 320 million active consumers every month who send 10 billion messages to one another every day, a Microsoft representative tells WebProNews.

Goober announced the availability of a new VoIP app and an IM app for the iPhone and iPod Touch this week. The company shared a few details with WebProNews about what makes its apps stand out from the competition.

"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."

Seesmic announced today that it has acquired Ping.fm. This is a service that has half a million active users posting daily from various devices by sending email, text messages, and chat.

Update: Yahoo Messenger 10 is now out of beta. Features include: high quality video calling, Yahoo Updates view of your contacts list, and availability in 16 languages.

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.

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 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 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.

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: 

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 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 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.

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.

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.

Yahoo announced that it now offers an SMS chat feature in its classic version of Yahoo Mail, something Gmail has been offering for several months, and Yahoo has been doing in its newer version since 2007.

Google has offered SMS in its chat since October, and Chat in general for quite some time. They have also launched voice and video chat recently.

Yahoo has released an update of its Messenger version 9.0. The new version, as highlighted on the Yahoo Messenger Blog, includes:

Instant messaging and group chat provider Meebo is now allowing users to communicate with each other through both MySpace and Facebook IDs as well as all the other ones previously supported, like AIM, Yahoo, Google, MSN, Jabber, ICQ, etc.