back to article Yahoo! goes head-to-head with FaceTime!

Yahoo! has added video calling to its iPhone application, as promised, though we're still waiting for the Android equivalent so fanbois can make rude gestures at each other. Video calling was promised for both platforms last week, with interoperability between the iPhone, Android, and desktop clients promised as well as …

COMMENTS

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  1. aaee
    WTF?

    It doesn't work!

    Just tried it this morning. Download the app and run it on my iPhone4. Tried to make a video call to my desktop PC messenger client (latestest version). The app took a long time and appeared to be unresponsive, and almost wanna kill it. Finally it managed to show me the video call screen and started dialling after seemed like ages. Guess what. No video showing on the desktop client. It's only via WiFi! Absolutely time waster piece of junk!

  2. TeeCee Gold badge

    "...applications that replicate functionality provided by Apple...."

    What's the resolution of the Yahoo version?

    If, as I suspect, it's more of yer bog-average grainy video chat, Apple may just regard it as a helpful illustration of how much better, game-changing and knicker-wettingly wonderful their proprietary FaceTime is.........

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    i cannot see...

    his holiness allowing his sheep to video call the rest of us.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Not so much.

    "But it seems Cupertino has become more relaxed about the whole thing recently and it seems that iPhone users can cope with having multiple video chat clients."

    Not so much relaxed, as correctly noticed that they were about to get hammered by EU anti-competition law so hard Jobs' turtle neck would have been spun off.

    Yahoo Messenger is a bit of a resourced starved mess, so it's even more damning for Apple that they've got this out of the door before Apple has any form of cross platform video chat (even to Macs), or the "open standard" Jobs promised Facetime would be in June appears to not be open at all (certainly Jobs' promise that it was to be submitted to standard boards back then hasn't happened).

  5. Rich 30
    Stop

    Boring...

    Are we still interested in video calling? We weren't before FaceTime, and i still cant see why we would. I can only imagine its been a bit of a flop seeing as Apple havn't been shouting about how many millions of hours of FaceTime has been used worldwide.

  6. nickrw
    WTF?

    Yahoo(excalamation mark)

    I downloaded the yahoo IM client to give this a spin with my iPhone 4, then got cross at Yahoo(excalamation mark) for all the sneakware they try and install.

    It asked me if I wanted to install a number of crap applications along with the one I actually wanted, but I got suspicious because the yahoo toolbar wasn't mentioned. Sure enough, if you click 'Advanced options' (which isn't in as obvious a position as it is on most installers) it is listed and checked by default.

    Poor show, Yahoo(exclamation mark).

  7. TheFifth

    No Mac Support

    Video doesn't work between iPhone and a Mac desktop client, although it does seem to work with a Windows PC. A massive oversight in my opinion. Messenger for Mac is under supported and hasn't had an update in an age, and the last few updates have been tiny bug fixes. Nothing new added since Beta 2 in 2007!

    Messenger 3 was a rewrite by Tristan O'Tierney (from the Colloquy project) who was brought in to bring the Mac client up to scratch. He was only given one other dev to help him. He left in 2007 and when people complained on his blog about the lack of updates to Messenger he replied, "Feel free to direct your complaints to people at yahoo - I’m no longer with the company. Part of my frustration was with the stagnation of the project.".

    I need iPhone to Mac video calls, but I'm not holding my breath for video between iPhone and Mac ever to work. Messenger for Mac is a dead project as far as Yahoo is concerned.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yahoo! Smarhoo

    What we want is Skype, like everyone else uses

  9. Charles Manning

    Y! bigger! brand!

    Does bigger brand really mean anything any more? A brand really only has value if it is going in the right direction. When it is going in the wrong direction all that branding really hurts.

    Both MS and Y! are damaged brands. Microhoo would have killed them both off faster.

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