In this announcement for the app on the Yahoo Mail blog, there is only mention of an Android version, and no mention of an iPhone version, though an iPhone is shown in the image provided (above) – I guess to just show that iPhone users can still get text messages from it.

“For those heavy texters out there, we are excited to introduce Hub, a fast and easy-to-use mobile messaging app that allows you to send text messages and have group conversations for free,” says the Yahoo Mail team. “Hub allows you to easily add participants to any conversation thread so it’s easy to switch from private messaging to a group conversation. Whether it is just keeping up with a close group of friends or making spontaneous plans, you no longer have to deal with scattered messages.”

“What’s more, Hub allows you to send messages to anyone without incurring any text messaging fees,” the company adds. “Yes, you heard us right. There are no text messaging fees – messages are sent over WIFI or using your data connection – and Hub is device agnostic, which means you can communicate with anyone on any mobile device as long as you have their mobile phone numbers. Your friends are not required to download the app in order to reply to your messages although they are strongly encouraged to do so in order to enjoy the full feature set!”

This isn’t the first app to to offer free text messaging, but the Yahoo brand probably won’t hurt in it getting some downloads. It has group messaging, and support for local and international SMS messages.

You do have to have a Yahoo ID to use the app from the looks of it.

Earlier this week, Yahoo launched a new version of Yahoo Messenger (11.5). Yahoo lists the highlights as follows:

"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.

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

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.

On the Yahoo Messenger Blog, the company highlights three options:

1. Download the latest version for Windows

2. Use Yahoo messenger for the Web

3. Use the built-in IM feature in Yahoo Mail.

Now, when Yahoo says download the latest version for Windows, they’re talking about version 9.0, which does include increased security, spam protection, voice calling, free text messaging, and the ability to IM people using Windows Live Messenger.

However, a few weeks ago, Yahoo made a string of announcements, including one for Yahoo Messenger Version 10, which is actually now available in beta. New features for this one include video calling, friend updates from Yahoo, Flickr, Twitter, and others through a new updates view, and improved language support.

So if you’re a Yahoo Messenger fan, you may just want to go straight to version 10. I don’t know why they didn’t mention it in the blog post, but it definitely has more features. Being in Beta, perhaps it is still a bit buggy.

If you do use version 10, Yahoo offers some tips for making video calls here.

The app comes equipped with the following features:

- Instant message
- Photo sharing
- Stealth settings
- Custom Status message
- Recent conversations archive
- Special idle state
- Additional settings

"If you have to leave the app for whatever reason, like a call comes in or you click a link in an IM that takes you to Safari, the Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone app will keep you signed in but change your status to idle," explains Product Manager Sarah Bacon. "That way you can continue to receive messages and provided you return to the app within ten minutes, pick up where you left off."

You can see a demo of the app in the following clip:

Yahoo notes that to download the app right now, users need to use the direct link, but starting tomorrow, it will be searchable in the app store as well.

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.

Anyhow, with Yahoo’s chat you can communicate with other people using Yahoo as well as mobile phones. Product Manager Brandon Savage writes:

How does it work, you ask? Well, when you sign into your Yahoo! Mail Classic account, your Chat & Mobile Text contact list will appear on the left of your screen (you can place it above or below your personal folders, whichever you prefer). If your status says “Offline,” just click on it and select “Available” to sign in (fair warning to Yahoo! Messenger users: signing in here will log you out elsewhere). Once you do, you’ll see a list of all of your Contacts who are online and available to chat. We also show you the names of any Contacts with mobile phone numbers, for mobile texting, of course. Just click on a name to start a conversation!

The competition between Yahoo and Google in email certainly does seem to be heating up lately. Back in the summer, Yahoo unveiled its offline email client, which Google has just gotten around to. It will be interesting to see what the market share looks like later in th year.

 - Various bug fixes to address sign-in issues that some users were experiencing. And another fix for a Windows Vista crash that occurred due to a conflict between 9.0 and IOLO anti0virus software.

– A new location for the typing notification message. When you’re in an IM conversation, you’ll notice that the “XXXX is typing a message” notification now appears inline with the conversation up above (rather than at the bottom of the IM window).

– A new version of the offline message window. You’ll now find a distinction between offline messages from friends on your list and those that aren’t, as well as easier spam reporting.

Interestingly enough, the update comes with some bugs of its own that Yahoo is aware of, Product Manager Sarah Bacon explains. Some users are having some installation problems. Bacon promises that the team is working hard to fix this.

The Yahoo Messenger blog noted this preview release sports an entirely new interface. This draws from the Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsoft’s graphics subsystem in use with Vista.

The user interface and core functionality represent the areas of focus Yahoo centered on in building the client. Tab organization, enhanced emoticons, and the ability to skin individual IM windows list among the features.

As with other versions of Yahoo Messenger, this client can IM Windows Live Messenger clients. People can drag and drop contacts from Yahoo Messenger to the Windows Sidebar gadget and track them from there.

Plenty of work remains for Yahoo to do with the Vista version of Messenger. 64-bit support is on the list of future developments, along with almost every multimedia and messaging feature that isn’t a direct IM to another IM client.

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Yahoo Messenger 9.0 in beta has added features that make the service more social in nature. There is now extra room to post a picture or other image next to contact names and users can share video or photos in the message screen. Users can also forward messages to their mobile phones when they are away from their computers.

Sabrina Ellis, vice president of Yahoo Messenger commented on the new social features saying, "In some ways, if you look at it Yahoo Messenger is a social network in that people have actually defined who their friends are and these are people they communicate with," she told IDG News.

Last month Yahoo Messenger had 94. 3 million unique users, an increase of almost 30 percent from September 2006 and second globally to Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger with 227 million users according to comScore.

On the overall integration of social features into Yahoo Messenger Ellis said, " This makes it easier fro people to stay connected and grow their friendships. We added several personalization features. We think a lot of the media- sharing will really help."

This post on theYahoo Messenger blog a little while ago inspired 872 comments.  The post was supposed to be about some technical problems that Yahoo is having, but the common thread in all the comments is that all the accessible chat rooms are full of bots making automatic sales pitches.  These bots need eyeballs to justify their existence, and they’ve driven those eyeballs away en masse.  Yahoo’s chat rooms have instead become echoing chambers where bots hawk products to each other.  This isn’t viral marketing anymore.  It’s become an epidemic.

The first online viral marketing success story that I remember was with the independent movie The Blair Witch Project.  The filmmakers cleverly promoted it as a true story using a TV show, the press, and guerilla marketing to drive traffic to the film’s Website.  Although I can find no proof of this, if memory serves, the filmmakers also hired people to go into chat rooms and promote the film, also as being “real.”

The film may not have been real, but the buzz it generated certainly was.  The public consciousness elevated it to epic proportions, to the point where I suffered through an hour and a half of motion sickness just to be a part of this event.  Their viral marketing campaign worked like a charm because it was original, fresh, and, most importantly, people believed it.

Good luck pulling that off nowadays.  People can smell a robot in a chat room from a mile away.  Viral email chains, you know, those annoying emails you sometimes get from your friends that say “if you forward this to ten friends, we’ll give you half off,” have more or less gone by the wayside.  And user-generated product reviews have been completely polluted by the epidemic.  Web users are well aware that positive book reviews on Amazon might be written by the writer, the editor, or the publisher posing as an anonymous reader.  At the same time, a negative review might be written by a jealous rival with an axe to grind. 

Word to viral marketers out there, don’t insult your audience by sending out robots to pose as people, posting anonymous user feedback, or creating incentives for people to annoy their friends.  The audience knows that you’re not one of them, that you are in fact a businessman with an agenda.  The only way to gain the audience’s trust, and the key to viral marketing in the age of the tech-savvy consumer, is reaching influencers.  And as the Internet becomes increasingly social, you’ll be able to find ways to reach influencers.

The most likely candidates for online influencers are power users.  They’re the people who modify their Facebook profiles every day, and communicate constantly with other users.  Online communities are getting closer and closer to being able to track these power users and discern their likes and dislikes. 

Suppose that one power user is connected to two hundred people on Facebook.  Those two hundred people might get a message from Facebook saying that their friend (the power user) has just watched the trailer for a certain movie, or just bought a handbag from a certain designer, or a certain brand of jeans.  Maybe one of those two hundred people is also a power user, who then goes out and buys the same product that the original power user bought.  Now the second power user’s two hundred friends get the same message, and so on. 

If online communities can offer a package similar to what I’ve described to advertisers (and rumor has it that they’re getting closer and closer) that will be the new word of mouth.  Because if you think about it, face to face meetings with friends are gradually being replaced by phone meetings, chat sessions, and social networking Websites. 

On the other hand, chat room robots, viral emails, and user generated feedback have done the one thing that a successful virus never does–they’ve killed their hosts.