Yahoo offers free phone calls via IM

By Steve Malone

Posted on 18 May 2005 at 12:38

The Internet portal Yahoo! has introduced a new beta version of its popular instant messenger program.

In a bid to take advantage of the world wide interest in VoIP telephony the company is introducing a 'free phone' facility that will allow subscribers to make calls to anywhere in the world.

Given that VoIP is becoming an increasingly popular application for broadband subscribers, the surprise is that Yahoo! has taken so long to jump on board the VoIP bandwagon - it has been pursuing an aggressive product development strategy across all its properties, along with other IM vendors. AOL has had a PC-to-PC version out for a while but has yet to allow calls anywhere. Meanwhile, market leader Skype is claiming over 100 million downloads of its VoIP product and is continuing its development.

The underlying technology has already been pioneered in the UK via Yahoo!'s partnership with BT. The BT Communicator is a standalone product which allows customers to make VoIP phone calls via their PC.

The two companies already have a strong relationship in the UK, with Yahoo! offering a value added service to BT's basic broadband offerings. The Communicator product is already closely linked to Yahoo! Messenger in the UK, and Yahoo!'s UK experience is bound to have fed back into providing voice calls via instant messenger.

The new beta of Y!M now has the ability to allow subscribers to drag and drop pictures from their desktop into an instant message. In this instance Yahoo! is playing catch-up as the ability to swap pictures while chatting was introduced into the latest version of MSN Messenger in its last update and has been available for Google's Picasa picture sharing application for a while.

Finally, Y!M has been updated to reinforce the Yahoo! 360 communities project. The software now makes it easier for a user to share their address book and inform their buddy lists of updates to their blogs.

The subscribers in the UK and Ireland can get the new beta version of the Yahoo! Messenger beta at the Yahoo! website.