I opened my Yahoo! Mail page this evening to check my email and noticed there’s a whole new version of interface. Like everyone else they’re providing the opportunity to do more "social" stuff like updating a status. The general appearance and layout has been cleaned up and sharpened a bit too.

I’m still working on some in-depth feature improvements. Texting isn’t new, unless I can get it to really work this time then that would be an improvement. The discussion about what’s new with social networking stuff included a twitter icon and YouTube, but still working on what’s involved in that change.

A WordPress application is new. Being able to publish to a WordPress blog could be interesting. Tried to install the app though and there was some kind of error. Will try that again later.

Some other cool applications related to images are abundant: flickr, Photobucket, MyPhotos and even Picnik for editing all of those images. The list of applications starts to remind me of the early days of Facebook.

Still can’t figure out why they’re showing the twitter icon. Let me know if you figure it out.

There seems to be quite a bit of development going on in the Instant Messaging arenas on a variety of different fronts. You’ve got your individual clients that are always releasing updates. Third party clients that aggregate the individual platforms to a single interface and buddy list. Then you have the website applications that aggregate the individuals to a web page interface with no software to download.

imo.im is the latter and have provided a very simple interface to combine your IM clients onto the web. I tried it out and it does a good job of quickly connecting to your accounts and displaying your buddy lists.

imo.im brings together all the major platforms and has just released the ability to pull in Skype contacts as well, which is a big plus in my opinion.

April 20, 2009 - Palo Alto — imo.im is a free online service that aims to make online communication more intuitive and accessible.  It couples voice, video, and text chat capabilities with the most popular instant messaging protocols. Currently in alpha stage development, the startup has released an update that introduces major new features and makes imo.im one of the only multi-protocol instant messaging services to offer Skype support.

In addition to Skype, MySpace Chat support has been added in the latest release. Voice and Video capabilities are now also functional on all supported networks–AIM, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, MySpace, Skype, and Yahoo. No download or registration is required to use the service, and multiple accounts on different instant messaging networks can be linked together to one sign-in.

Language support has been expanded as well, through imo’s user-driven translation program launched in April 2008. With this system, imo now offers language support for Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Macedonian, French, Turkish, and more.

Finally, eight new features have been added giving users the ability to:

• Star favorite buddies for easy reference
• Upload and view buddy icons
• Search for offline as well as online buddies
• Change how a buddy’s display name appears in the contacts list
• Move buddies between groups
• Block and unblock buddies
• Set yourself as invisible upon login
• Voice and video chat with anyone

For a comprehensive list of imo.im features, please visit the imo.im website at http://imo.im/features.html

About:
imo.im (http://imo.im/about.html) is a web-based multi-network instant messaging service. It lets users IM chat with buddies on AIM, Google Talk, MSN, MySpace, Skype, and Yahoo simultaneously. The company was founded by Georges Harik (co-developer of Google’s AdSense technology), Ralph Harik, and Praveen Krishnamurthy in April 2007.

My personal preference is a separate application if I’m running on my own computer. I currently use Trillian Pro by Cerulean Studios, however sites like imo.im come in very handy when you need access to your IM Buddy Network, but aren’t on your own computer.

I’m still waiting for the application that will combine IM, Skype, Facebook, twitter and other social media sites into one interface. Now THAT would be nice.

I just received an email this morning letting me know that my Yahoo! Briefcase will be closing its doors and tossing my files. So I spent a few minutes downloading them and now I get to go through them. Doubt there’s anything on there I needed since I haven’t used them in forever.

Dear Yahoo! Briefcase user,

We will be officially closing Yahoo! Briefcase on March 30, 2009. Until then, we are offering you the opportunity to download your files back to your computer. You will need to take action before we close, after which any files remaining on Yahoo! Briefcase will be deleted and no longer accessible.

To access your Yahoo! Briefcase account, click the link below:

http://briefcase.yahoo.com/

If you’ve been using Yahoo! Briefcase, be sure and go grab your files before the end of next month.

I thought it might be interesting to share a recent blog post by my friend Brian Layman, whom I work with at b5media. He has shared recently on his blog some correspondence between him and Yahoo concerning what appears to be a desired upgrade to one of their services.

Have you had this kind of service from Yahoo!? I’d love to hear your own stories, but let’s get this issue exposed and blown wide-open to as many people as possible.

Angry letter to Flickr/Yahoo by Brian Layman

Jake just let me know about a new site called Scour that lets you search the web like you normally would but adds a few different things to the mix:

• Get results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN all together
• Rate search results instantly
• Get rewarded by searching with Scour

Why does it seem to be so hard for me to think about using any search engine other than Google as my default? I’m sure that’s exactly what Google is wanting me to think though isn’t it?

I like the concept, but one thing I immediately noticed that I don’t like is that this is the URL you get when you click on the results to a link:

http://www.scour.com/view/result/?URL=http://www.bnpositive.com/blog/

The reason is because there’s a little comment bar on the bottom of the page that let’s you rate the page and give more information back to Scour about what you think. You can click on the “X” to close it, but that’s annoying to me. Not sure how else you’ll get the feedback they’re wanting though.

The idea of making some money for doing what we’re already doing by searching the Internet. According to their site, here’s the type of money you could potentially be making with getting more people to sign-up under you and get a little kick back from their search results too.

Give Scour a try and sign-up now for their beta. Of course I’d love for you to sign-up under me so just click on one of the links above and sign-up. If I make enough money to retire on a private island in the Caribbean, I’ll let you know.

One of the earliest e-mail addresses I had was a Yahoo! Mail address and it’s been the one I’ve used almost exclusively for friends and family to contact me and stay in touch.

You can now add a couple more free e-mail domains to those that you can manage from the familiar Yahoo! Mail interface:  @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com

If you’re interested in adding another e-mail address to your contact information and still use the Yahoo! e-mail interface then just go sign-up for one of these new addresses now.

What I’m wanting them to do is let me manage multiple Yahoo! e-mail addresses from one login. Someone let me know when you’re able to do that.

Dogpile has a little fun promotion going on right now where you can send a little bit of a humorous spoof e-mail to your friends on April Fool’s Day this year.

As you can see from the graphic above there are a number of different messages and jokes you can send with their tool.

Another nice little benefit of this fun little promotion is that you can go there now and setup the messages to be delivered for you on April Fool’s Day!

Just look for the doggy to dig up some April Fool’s Day fun.

If you’re not familiar with Dogpile, it’s a search engine that piles all the results of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search, and Ask for the results.

Go uncover more from your own search results by using Dogpile.