GTalk and Yahoo Messenger to be made interoperable
[Guest post by Raghu, who saw the interoperablility details slide at Google/Yahoo ad-deal site. Not sure whether this is an old news or something new..]
Yahoo Messenger and GTalk will be made interoperable and users will be able to exchange IMs, see friend’s online presence and add contacts from either service to their friend’s list. – source
What sort of interoperability do you think will work?
Yahoo and MSN announced interoperability in 2005 and frankly speaking, it wasn’t very helpful. The basic challenge with the interoperability is that you need to add MSN friends to existing Yahoo contacts (and vice versa), and that defies the very logic of why people use different IM clients (they have different people on diff. IMs, relating to different intents – like college friends, office friends etc).
What’s your take?
It seems, GTalk will be made interoperable with MSN messenger as well.
About the author - 
wow.. I wholeheartedly welcome this move! I have a few friends on yahoo who don’t use Google talk and I find it inconvenient to log in Yahoo messenger just to chat with those few friends.
That will be a great move.
Right now I find it very convinient to chat with my MSN friends right from the Yahoo! Messenger. And also adding MSN friends is a breeze. ( I didn’t get your point of basic challenge )
However the Y!m MSN interoperability is limited only to text chat and it would be better if there can be voice chat and file exchange as well. I hope GTalk-Yahoo! would have those features.
FYI: The talks have been since the time Google made a Press Release somewhere in June 2008 (Google Announces Non-Exclusive Advertising Services Agreement with Yahoo! in U.S. and Canada) – http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20080612_yahoo.html
“In addition, Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services bringing easier and broader communication to users. ”
I am looking forward for this movie..but have no clue if this will make the IM’s any better.. I did try adding few of my MSN Contacts in Yahoo! but for some reason.. I didn’t like using it.. and had to switch bakc to MSN to chat with them.
More than being interoperale.. I would look forward from Google/Yahoo in bringing the features of respective IM’s to other users using other service.
Cheers,
Vinay
Thanks Vinay for the info – even I wasn’t sure whether this is something new or not.
And yeah, I too agree with you that we need better interoperability and lets hope Y!/GTalk provides that.