I’m sure all of you have had a chat online with your buddies via a IM client. I’m sure you must have realized that most of the IM clients are boring, and its not so fun to have a conversation in boring interfaces.

Well an addon for MSN Messenger called HiYo claims to bring back your chat sessions to life.

The Instant Messaging world needs a serious shaking. What we see around us is old school conventions forced into the hectic world of Instant Messaging, and it doesn’t work. Though Instant Messaging has been around for 10 years now, there is still so much more room for enhancing and enriching our conversations.

In a nutshell HiYo replaces the dull textual exchange we call “Instant Messaging” into a frickin’ fun experience.

"HiYo is a free add-on for Windows Live Messenger, offering the best quality graphical content available on the net. HiYo offers a wide variety of Winks, Animations, Emoticons and Sounds that suit every mood, emotion and style. It upgrades the Instant Messaging experience making it a lot more fun and exciting than before. HiYo is very user friendly; everyone can easily browse and enjoy the content. HiYo also offers unique features such as interactive talking animations, automatically suggested content that interacts with your conversation, and slideshows of personal photos in the user’s display image within Messenger." 

I’ve tried out HiYo, and as far as I can tell, the experience of IM does get a lot more fun. I am sure it will be liked by a large pool of people who use IM regularly to communicate.’m not sure about the benefits of using HiYo regularly. For some people getting work done is more important, and IM is a time killer. Hiyo is not for those kind of people.

Here are a few screenshots of HiYo in action. Prepare yourselves to be surprised because I’m sure you haven’t seen such kind of interactivity in any other IM solution as yet.

Looks cool and fun right? HiYo is highly addictive and I’m sure you might never want to end a conversation if you are using it.

Well let me pick out the gripes of using HiYo :

• Works with Windows Live Messenger only. I’m not sure how many users use Live messenger, but I’m a long time fan of GTalk. So didn’t have many buddies to chat on Live Messenger+HiYo !
• Other thing is that both you and the guy you are chatting with need to have HiYo installed. This is quite sad, since you need to get all your friends to install it to be able to enjoy the HiYo experience.
• Eats up memory pretty fast.

Apart from these HiYo is a rocking, fun product to use. I hope they are considering releasing compatible versions that work well with GTalk and Yahoo Messenger.

HiYo is made by the guys behind Incredimail which happens to be another popular email client.

If you are Live Messenger user, then HiYo is a must have tool for you, if you want to make your conversations more fun and interesting.

If you have any other questions about HiYo head over to their FAQ, or download it right away.

I got an invite email from a friend of mine, and it was for a product named OoVoO. I usually delete all invite emails before marking them as spam. But this time, I opened this one to see what it had to say. After reading the features, I ended up installing he product and now I feel so happy for having opened that email, because I’m now a big fan of OoVoO.

OoVoO also happens to be a Webware 100 Winner and here’s what it does basically :

OoVoo is a free, standalone desktop chat application that has both a text and video chat capabilities. It can handle as many as six people in one video conference as well as a dozen in the integrated voice chat conference. Users can drop in and out of conversations, and the video windows will scale with a similar effect to iChat’s “swoop.”

OoVoo also doubles as a video e-mail service. Users can send each other video messages as long as a minute in length that are available right in the application or via e-mail. Users who get the e-mail are also provided a link that takes them to a live Flash version of the video, so they can access it while away from their home computer.

OoVoO is a real time video conferencing product. We can easily compare it with Yahoo messenger or Live messenger. But OoVoO is far superior, when we compare the video conferencing aspects of the product.

The video and audio quality is really mind blowing. Even when the bandwidth is limited it performs above what you’d expect it to. The video is almost instantaneous and there are no jerks in the voice.

OoVoo supports video conferencing for upto 6 people at a time. Even when all the 6 people are active the conference quality remains the same. The product has a neat interface in which all the 6 videos can be arranged.

One major feature that most of the other products in this niche lack and OoVoO has is the conference record facility. We can record the audio and video conferences that we conduct at the press of a single button. Already many companies here in India are using OoVoO for conducting discussions and recording them to be distributed.

I suggest you give this amazing app a try. You can download it from here.

This post was guest blogged by Kenney Jacob. He is a Successful Entrepreneur and Technology Evangelist. He blogs regularly at I am a Techie and his Personal blog.

Finally iPhone gets its first killer app. Yes you heard that right, Fring the Israeli company has come out with a beta of its native iPhone App.

Here’s what the press release reads like :

The special pre-release version will enable iPhone™ users to get an early taste of fring and discover the freedom of being able to take their fring^™ contacts and buddies from their other favorite online communities mobile on their iPhones.

They will also have the ability to make free and low cost mobile calls over WiFi & enjoy rich, IM-style live chat with their online contacts, regardless of whether they are on their mobiles, PC’s or other internet devices.

Considering that Fring is not a browser based app like the other IM clients we’ve seen for the iPhone like FlickIM or Mundu it needs a jailbroken iPhone to begin with.

We very well know that Jailbreaking isn’t popular with most of the iPhone crowd, but it looks like Fring may also be the first really killer application that can get non-early adopter users to consider using Jailbreak.

To me it looks like Fring is preparing for the official release of the SDK and third party apps on the AppStore. Once that is out, you should see a fully featured Fring client selling pretty well in the AppStore.

Installation of Fring on your iPhone should be easy if you already have a Jailbroken iPhone, just follow the instructions here and you should be all set to be Fringing!

Apple time to screw up, and come on guys open up the iPhone atleast now so that we can see more like Fring

Here’s a screenshot of Fring in action on an iPhone and a demo to excite you even more!

More Details here and here

I wonder how many of you regularly use Google Talk anymore? Its been ages since the Official Google Talk client was updated. We’ve patiently waited for new features like Group Chat, New Emoticons to make it into Google Talk, but so far that hasn’t happened. Well the Google Talk team has just released a “Labs Edition” of Google Talk which is more or less same as the Google Talk Gadget, just that it is the desktop version of Google Talk Gadget.

The Labs edition of Google Talk features notification for new messages from Google Calendar and Orkut, in additional to Gmail, new emoticons and group chat.

Though the Labs edition has added new features, at the same time it has also removed useful features like File Transfers, Voice Chat. Here’s what the FAQ reads like :

Google Talk, Labs Edition is an experimental release that brings some of the great features of the Google Talk Gadget to the desktop. Some features like voice calling and file transfer from the Google Talk client did not make it into this version.

I am going to wait and see if Google releases a newer version of Google Talk, with group chat, voice chat and all the newer features we’ve seen in Google Talk Gadget. At the moment I am going to stick with Digsby my favorite IM Client, as it manages my email, facebook, twitter etc… pretty well.

Download Google Talk Labs Edition (Windows Only at the moment)

You can now set a different color for each label so you can identify messages easier. Not all Gmail accounts have the new feature, but it will probably be enabled for everyone soon (Mine is yet to come!).

Another addition to GMail today was AIM Integration into the built in chat Module in GMail. You can now chat with all your AIM buddies right from your GMail account. To check to see if you have a lucky account (I’m sure they’ll be rolling this out to all users soon) logout, then log back into your account and click on Settings, from there visit the Chat tab and look at the bottom of the list for the section named AIM. Sign in, and your ready to go. You should see something like this :

The addition of these two features, surely makes GMail all the more fun to use and productive. I love the way GMail innovates! What you do you think about the new features? Are you going to use them?

]]> http://dailyapps.net/2007/12/gmail-adds-colored-labels-and-aim-support/feed/ 0 http://dailyapps.net/2007/11/gmail-adds-group-chat-and-smileys-to-chat/ http://dailyapps.net/2007/11/gmail-adds-group-chat-and-smileys-to-chat/#comments Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:28:10 +0000 Karthik Kastury http://dailyapps.net/2007/11/gmail-adds-group-chat-and-smileys-to-chat/ Read The Rest →]]> Ever since the Introduction of the new GMail, a lot of new features are being added to GMail on a regular basis. The latest one is the addition of Group Chat and Smileys into the Chat client that it is inbuilt into GMail. I have to say this is a cool new feature coming from the GMail team, because I can read through all my emails while having a group conversation will all my classmates for the next class outing!

Start a group chat by clicking on the Options link at the bottom of a conversation window. You’ll now see “Group Chat” as a new option. Once that’s selected, just type in the name of the person you’d like to add to your current conversation. If you don’t see the group chat option yet, try signing out and logging back into your Gmail account.

The added bonus of this new feature, is the addition of Smileys into the GMail Chat. Until now, this feature was not directly accessible, but now they are available at the click of a button.

Its really nice to see GMail continuing to innovate in this highly competitive market.

Screenshot Via Mashable

For the time being the Meebo integration is via Joost Widgets, but over time you can expect it to become more direct and better. Here is a screenshot of the inline Chat in Joost in action :

Its nice to Joost innovating and adding new features. With over 15000 shows and 250 channels Joost is getting ready for the primetime. On a related note, the Joost client has become more stable and faster recently which is good news for a lot of us.

Via Techcrunch

Ionut Alex Chitu over at Google System, while looking through the GMail code found stuff that was related to features not released as yet, which includes,

• Colors for Labels
• Detaching Messages from a Conversation
• And the ability to connect to multiple IM Networks like Yahoo, MSN, AIM etc…

I have been using Pidgin as my primary IM Client for almost an year now, simply because I couldn’t use GTalk to connect to my friends on Yahoo, MSN etc.. but if Google decides to implement Jabber Transports into GTalk, I would straightaway start using GTalk. If you are wondering what Jabber Transports is all about, then here is what Wikipedia has to say :

One of the things people like about Jabber is that you can communicate with users of legacy IM services like AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo. Unlike all-in-one IM clients like Trillian, what makes this possible in Jabber is a piece of software called a gateway (or "transport"), which runs in conjunction with a Jabber server such as jabber.org.

Another hint at the arrival of Jabber Transports in GTalk is ofcourse the new contacts manager that allows you to add details for multiple IM networks in your contacts. (See Screenshot)

I have got the new version of GMail and I am still testing it. So far its been good, baring a few bugs here and there, for which I am trying to find a solution. I really hope that Jabber Transports is implemented, because that will give GMail users a lot of advantage compared to Yahoo, MSN and others.

What else do you want to see in GMail 2.0??

Via Google System

Adium is the most used IM Client on OS X, but for a long due to inevitable comparisons with Apple’s own iChat, Adium lacked AV Chat and finally it is going to trump iChat in all respects.

Well this release has taken particularly more time than the previous release, but this is because of the dependency of Adium on the Pidgin Project for its core functionality. Pidgin also seems to be getting some nice upgrades.

Well here is a screenshot of Adium that has got the redefined Leopard look that looks a lot more cleaner and well laid out,

Well I am sure you are impressed with the new layout. But wait, there is something more. I am going to show you a screenshot of a Video Chat in progress,

Well that does look really amazing, doesn’t it!. If you are one of those impatient people who can’t wait until Adium is officially out, the SVN to svn://svn.adiumx.com/adium/branches/adium-2.0-vv/ and you should be able to pick up the latest build.

If you are an Adium fan, let us know in the comments. Is there anything that you would like to see in Adium.

Via Adium Blog