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 heading 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?
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)