I don’t know if you paid attention to it, but MSN Messenger has discreetly and quietly introduced Ad links in its message window. Quite smart and much better than the banners that ICQ are using. This Ad is for Coca-Cola Light.
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.
Just a short advice to my old colleagues at ICQ. Learn from “Don’t Mess With the Lord– Mess With The Messenger” . They have a thriving community of developers to plug-in’s and add’ ons etc for MSN Messenger. You need to engage people – get them involved and give them tools to develop stuff for ICQ. Or even better – learn from Mozilla and the Firefox community.
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