One of the most wanted features from Yahoo is now available. Its nothing but Web Based Yahoo Messenger. Many have been wondering, when many sites like Meebo, eBuddy etc.. allow web based yahoo chat, why doesn’t Yahoo. Even iGoogle has a Yahoo messenger gadget. And now its here from Yahoo itself. They have two domains. The first is the official yahoo subdomain : http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/ and the other is a short an easy-to-remember domain : http://web.im/. (I wonder which country’s TLD is .im).

In my opinion, this new feature has mainly been brought into action to get back the users who have gone to Gmail from Yahoo. Earlier they announced that they are planning to integrate the IM panel within the Email window similar to Gmail. Perhaps then they decided not to copy, so they now have it on a separate domain.

Unlike Gmail’s chat, this one uses Flash, which is one thing that i don’t like. This Web IM saves people time since it doesn’t need the users to download Y! Msgr. But this is compensated due to the requirement of Flash Player. Here’s a screenshot.

On the Yahoo blog, they posted :

We went out of our way to support all the browsers — IE, Firefox, Netscape, Safari (I’ve been a Mac guy since 1984, so this was really important to me), and Opera (because we have a soft spot for Norwegians). I think this just might be the fastest, most refined Web IM app out there. And through our interoperability agreement with Windows Live Messenger, Web messaging users are able to connect with the largest community of IM users — 350 million user accounts!

Its cool that it supports this many browsers. But i wouldn’t accept that it is the “fastest, most refined Web IM app out there”. I tried it few hours ago and it is pretty slow compared to Gmail. I’m not here to discuss its negatives alone. On the positive hand i love its look very much. Especially the way the chats are displayed. Also the tabs on the top.

Finally kudos to Yahoo for brining this feature. All the best and hope this gets bigger and better.