Yahoo Releases New Messenger: Instant Messaging 2.0
I had the opportunity to meet with Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo's VP of Product Strategy, last Thursday at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale. I was joined by Michael Arrington (Techcrunch), Andy Abramson (Communicano, by phone), and others. And what they showed us is a real breakthrough for Yahoo, one that advanced enough to be considered Instant Messaging 2.0.
Horowitz has been called the man behind the new sense of innovation and urgency at the company, but he is very self-effacing, stating that it is the great people working on his various teams that making that happen. People like these:
- Caterina Fake -- one of the Flickr founders, who heads Horowitz' Tech Dev team, a small group dedictaed to building fast prototypes.
- Jeremy Zawodny
- Chad Dickerson -- on Caterina's team, worked
forwith Udell atComputerworldInfoWorld where he was CTO
- danah boyd -- at the Berkeley Research Labs
- Marc Davis
- Tom Coates -- author of Plasticbag.org, formerly of the BBC.
It's obvious that Yahoo is staking a great deal on these change agents, and the projects they are pushing forward. Horowitz clearly wants us to believe that Yahoo as a whole is a hotbed of experimentation and invention, and that his team is only "the grease for innovation."
We learned that Thursday was Yahoo's Hack Day. At the last Hack Day 200 or 300 innovative ideas were dreamed up and prototyped, amny of which later have become product features or funded projects. (We were all upset to learn that John Markov of the New York Times was being allowed an exclusive participation at the final event of Hack Day, when the best ideas are presented.)
Jeffrey Bonforte, formerly of Gizmo, who took over as head of the Messenger team in January, gave us some background on the current limited beta of the new Messenger for Windows. It is really awesome. The primary advance of this generation of the software is a transition to a platform architecture, allowing Yahoo and its partners to create plugins to extend the Messenger functionality.
Some of the "miniapps" that were demoed were really compelling, featuring cobrowsing, and other social activities:
- One of the demoed plugins was a 'out on the town' planner, where users could collaboratively read restaurant reviews, see restaurants and other locations on a map, and schedule a time to meet, leveraging Yahoo's calendar, Local, and maps capabilities.
- The single most thought-provoking demo leveraged the Amazon wishist, and showed how Yahoo is aggressively pursuing a new vision of instant messaging. By selecting a certain person on your buddy list, the Amazon plugin follows through by displaying that person's wishlist.
They won't tell me dates for subsequent releases, but Jeffrey agreed that in the future it would make sense to support plugins being able to manipulate the buddylist, itself. So, I could launch a new web service -- say Meetro -- that supports geolocation of your buddies, and I could create a Meetro plugin for Yahoo that could reorder or regroup the Yahoo buddylist by proximity. Or build a plugin that would indicate the number of unread blog posts by each of your buddies directly on the buddy indicator, like a new sort of presence.
The SDK for the Windows baseline will be available today, at Yahoo's Developer Network.
While this release is not quite there, Yahoo is allowing us a first glimpse of what Instant Messaging 2.0 is going to look like.
Matthew Skyrm, the leader of the Mac Messenger team, demoed a new Mac client, version 3 -- the first in several years! -- which should be available for open beta at the end of the month. It does not share the plugin architecture of the new Windows Messenger, so its still out of sync, but Jeffrey suggested that in the future the Mac version might become the leader with new features, not the laggard. Would be an interesting turn around. The Mac cleint supports Growl as a notification mechanism, and is 100% Cocoa.
So, I can't wait for a Mac client at parity with the Windows client they have demoed. But leaving aside the current mismatch in versions, the plugin architecture, and what it will allow Yahoo and others to do, is a giant step forward. I have been howling for years about what I have called the "Nerdvana" instant messaging client, where all manner of social cues and status can be treated as just another flavor of presence: for event contact on my buddlylist I may want to display unread blog posts, upcoming calendar dates, pending emails, or geolocational information. With the plugin approach that Yahoo has adopted, all of that is going to be possible, at long last.
Jeffrey even promised me that the internal name for the next rev will be "Nerdvana" -- which is totally apt.
I'm not sure I see what is so revolutionary here. Other IM clients such as ICQ, Trillian and AIM support plugins.
Posted by: Jake | June 20, 2006 at 06:13 PM
With jabber being based on XML already, it should be possible to just add a rendering layer that could generically pull pretty much anything...
Posted by: Bill Seitz | June 25, 2006 at 10:17 AM
Yahoo Messenger can talk with msn now, not this is not exciting.
Posted by: jabber | September 07, 2006 at 08:02 AM