With all of the ranting and raving (bravo to Strauss, btw) going on over the past week and half, this morning I was pleasantly surprised when I logged into my Yahoo! Mail account and was notified that my Yahoo! IM would now be available from within my email window, and was reassured that our product development teams are full steam ahead. Ethan had previewed this functionality at Web 2.0 this year (so i am not letting the cat out of the bag), and now I believe that accounts on some of our internal server farms have been added the internal beta.
I have been playing with it for a while this morning and am happy to report that I think the integration is pretty sweet. There are some navigational challenges that I have had to overcome, but nothing monumental - e.g. getting used to using AJAX for IM and not being able to save chats in frame impressions. Actually, the navigation points I have flagged only resulted in me being more deliberate in working in the browser...I love being deliberate. I believe that this integration makes perfect sense. I am sure that Email and IM account for more than 95% of my communication during a day and love the idea of not having to flip between two clients in order to use both methods.
Some of the greatest integration points that I have noticed so far (and i will update this list as i go)
- Presence into the editing window: If you are composing a message to someone who is online, you will be notified and asked if you want to start an IM chat. Awesome! If you don't need to create a *paper trail" with an email, why would you. The reverse situation is true as well. If you are typing an IM message and the person goes offline, you are prompted to send an email. Awesome.
- Avatars and timestamps: Brings some of the life that IM clients give you and adds it to more boring email
- Status messages while people are typing: getting away from the mundane and using randomly generated phrases such as "stand by for another ingenious dispatch from [person x]"
One integration negative so far:
- If a person is using YMJ (Yahoo! Music Jukebox) and they have elected to display the current song in their status window, the status is updated in the IM/Mail integrated view, but only says "[person x] is available". I guess they haven't finished integrating all three yet.
- Message history isn't being saved (or at least i can't figure out where it is being saved): not that much of a pain, but its a huge call out to difference of IM and email. I doubt we will ever fully move away from email for IM, even though that is the trend, just because people use email messages, which are usually longer, for reference
I like the idea of making communication more enjoyable. Companies continue to innovate around new ways for us to communicate with each other, and will continue down that path. But it is nice to know that certain of these historical innovations have disparate paths that can eventually merge and make our lives simpler.
I will keep playing around, trying things out and seeing if i can get some insight into other features and functionality, but in the meantime, let me know if you have any features that you would like to see in and IM/Email client and keep the conversation going. I haven't tried out the Gmail/IM integration (given that there are probably 10x more people on the Y! mail and IM clients and I work at Y!, why would I) so let me know if you have had a chance to compare the two, objectively of course ;)
Hope you get to use the Y! beta soon!
