Yahoo Mail Links With IM

Yahoo will soon start to fulfill a promise it made to users several months ago to tie its new Web mail service with its instant messaging application.

Starting this Monday and continuing over the coming months, Yahoo will activate this feature for users of the new version of Yahoo Mail, which is in beta, or test, phase but available to all users of the service.

Yahoo officials demonstrated the integration of the Yahoo Mail beta with Yahoo Messenger in November at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The audience reacted enthusiastically to the plan.

The new feature alerts Yahoo Mail beta users if their contacts are logged on to Yahoo Messenger and gives them the option of starting a text chat session from within the mail interface. If the user is composing an e-mail message but wants to chat instead, Yahoo Mail can grab the text and paste it into the text chat window. Likewise, the chat session can be automatically imported to an e-mail message form.

This integration with Yahoo Messenger is the first of several tie-ups the company plans to implement in the (Yahoo Mail beta), because it wants the service to offer multiple communication options to its users, said John Kremer, Yahoo Mail's vice president.

Although he declined to confirm future plans, he acknowledged it would make sense to let Yahoo Mail users launch voice conversations and to create links to the company's social networking service, Yahoo 360. Another likely development would be to extend Yahoo Messenger's interoperability with Microsoft Windows Live Messenger into the Yahoo Mail beta, he said.

The beta version, a free service, offers a number of improvements over the current version, including a more agile interface based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) that works like a desktop application. The beta was introduced in September 2005. Unlike typical Web mail services, it lets users drag and drop messages into folders, provides a pane to preview messages' content and offers the ability to have multiple message windows open.

Canonical and Linspire team up

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced today a new partnership with commercial Linux distributor Linspire. The partnership will primarily entail technical collaboration. Linspire's commercial distribution—which is currently based on Debian—will become an Ubuntu derivative, and Canonical will integrate Linspire's Click-n-Run (CNR) software distribution system into Ubuntu.

Freespire 2.0, the next major version of Linspire's community-driven distribution, will be Linspire's first release to be based on Ubuntu. Early Freespire 2.0 releases will be available in the first quarter of 2007, and the final release will occur after the release of Ubuntu Feisty in April. Linspire will continue to incorporate its own proprietary components, but at this time it is still unclear whether Linspire will switch to GNOME or use Kubuntu packages to provide KDE.

As part of the deal, Canonical plans to adopt Linspire's CNR system for commercial software distribution. CNR enables users to purchase, install, update, and manage proprietary codecs and commercial Linux applications through a single cohesive interface. The system, which supports approximately 20,000 applications, includes free proprietary applications like Google Earth and RealPlayer 10 as well as commercial applications like LinuxCAD.

Google to create web-based presentation program?

A localization data file found at docs.google.com allegedly contained references to Presently, which some have speculated is an office presentation program similar to Google Writely. Although the references have since been removed, the original version of the file was copied and is still circulating around the Internet. Google has not yet confirmed or denied the existence of Presently, but the evidence in question seems to indicate that the product is at least planned, if not under active development.

Based on the contents of the localization file, Presently appears to be a presentation application modeled after Microsoft Powerpoint with support for features like full-screen viewing and the ability to convert data between presentation and document formats. The localization file also seems to indicate that the Presently program is unsupported in Opera.

The addition of a presentation application to Google's current productivity offerings could put Google in a position to compete more directly with Microsoft in the integrated office suite arena. Although Google's word processing and spreadsheet applications lack much of the functionality found in Microsoft Office, some Office users take advantage of only a fraction of the software's features. Ease of use and the ability to leverage Internet storage and easily collaborate on documents could give Google's productivity apps enough appeal to disrupt the office suite market, which has traditionally been one of Microsoft's more profitable spaces.