a step in the right direction
You may have already heard about the plans for Yahoo! & MSN IM services to start playing well together:
MSN and Yahoo Messenger will be glued together, forming the world’s largest instant messaging community at some 275 million combined users, the services’ companies announced on Wednesday… The resulting integration, due out in the second quarter of next year, will give users of both services typical IM abilities: to tell when their friends are online, to share some emoticons, to put through free PC-to-PC phone calls and to easily add new contacts from either service to their friends list.
The rest of the story is here. This bodes well for library IM reference service providers, of course, because it means one less IM login to worry about; and it bodes equally well for library IM reference service users since interoperability removes one barrier to access the library’s IM service. The fewer the barriers, the better.
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