A new war has heated up on the IM market – Skype is releasing IM developer tools. This on the same day that Google Talk was launched – what a co-incident…If AOL, MSN and Yahoo got a bit nervous about Google Talk, I guess this announcement wasn’t too welcome either. Tuff days on the IM market – but very interesting too, competition is healthy and will bring out the best products, however I believe this will be the beginning of the end of the weaker IM’s that are already struggling to keep it up. The Skype IM developer tools will enable softwares and web services to integrate Skype IM to their offering which is really very welcome. Expect to see Skype IM on many desktop applications and web services like dating, social networks and blogs in the near future. And by the way, why not on browsers too?
AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Y! and Skype – watch out! It is quite simple, but then again for an IM you don’t need any other features. Haven’t tried the voice function yet so will come back on that one.
The ink of my last post hardly had time to dry, before the rumors of Google’s upcoming Instant Messenger – Google Talk surged. It seems to have come with the Picasa deal (Hello) a proprietary IM used to share pictures and post to blogs, and according to Om Malik is based on the open source Jabber protocol and will be the worst possible news for someone like Skype, because now they will be up against not two but three giants who want to offer a pale-version of Skype. Don’t know about that, but they definitely have to watch out – it’s going to be a tuff challenge. I remember talk’s with the Google product people over one year and their keen interest in an IM. Like I said – definitely makes sense and very welcome (just hope that it will live up to the expectations) just hope that it will not be filled with all kinds of meaningless features.
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