Carole
McManus (no relation) has a
great post on the Yahoo! Messenger blog about the innovations we saw in IM
over 2006. She says that 2006 was a “watershed year” for IM innovation,
citing a
Nick Gonzalez post on Techcrunch last November. The features that Nick
highlighted then were: interoperability, flexible identities, rich media chat,
in-browser chat, location-based chat, and contextual chat.
Carole notes some other companies, apart from Yahoo, who are ramping up IM
technology: Wablet, Meebo, RadiusIM, InCircles, Skype, and PalTalk.
Personally I now use 4 different IM apps on a regular basis – Skype (my main
business client), Yahoo Messenger (great avatars!), Google Talk and AIM. I use
Meebo occasionally too, if I’m on another computer or just want everything on
one page. It’s amazing how crucial IM has become as a business tool – although
it can also be a distraction at times, of course.
What IM clients do you use – and where do you see the industry headinng in
2007? I’d like to think interoperability will be improved even further and also
an ‘open ID’ kind of system for IM would be great. Thoughts?
