Zync - a New Way NOT to Advance the State of the Art

So i hate to hate cause haters never win. But I’m sick of short-sighted walled garden stuff and when I see a really smart team putting valuable energy in the wrong direction, I cringe.

Yahoo Research : Berkley just released a cool shared video-watching chat plugin called Zync. Good for them. Interactive TV-watching applications are an interesting idea. But instead of developing their plugin for one of the open source IM clients that support Yahoo IM like Adium or Gaim (uh I mean Pidgin) — both of whom desperately need development help with video — they wrote it for the Yahoo-exclusive Messenger chat client. You know, the one that can’t talk to iChat users, AIM users, Jabber users, GMail users, etc, etc. Wha? Why innovate in a vacuum?

Seems like a missed opportunity for Yahoo’s research team to advance the state of the art in video chatting for all net users, to win over new customers by tantalizing Aim/Jabber users in a shared space, and create goodwill toward Yahoo in the developer community at large.


Tagged: Film & Video, Clowns, Open Source

4 Comments

  1. Comment by ayman on April 25, 2007 5:58 pm

    Thanks for the good props here. I would like to point out; we build research prototypes at the lab. Part of building prototypes is finding a good place to develop and deploy them.

    Yahoo Messenger 8.1 for Windows allows you to make conversation plug ins using a nice AJAX/HTML + FLASH framework. Check out the API at developer.yahoo.com, Zync uses the public API.

    Pidgin and Trillian offer incomplete docs for a plug in c/c++ sdk. This significantly increases the barrier to release, especially when building an app to share web video.

    With Zync, our choice of platform was determined by a desire to rapidly prototype not by a desire to be closed or proprietary.

  2. Comment by jm3 on April 25, 2007 6:05 pm

    Word up, I appreciate that it’s a propotype, but… what’s the installed base of Yahoo Messenger?

    As a Mac user the windows APIs and trillian frameworks don’t do much for me, but if there was something Pidgin or Adium could pick up, though, i’d be all over it.

  3. Comment by $h4r1f on May 2, 2007 2:46 am

    what up doe. ichat will have shared video capability come Leopard, no? and application sharing… and screen sharing… maybe ice cream sharing. looks like apple is letting people play with it: http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/imframework.html

  4. Comment by jm3 on May 2, 2007 9:43 am

    @ sharif: dang. yeah. and aim + jabber support is nice. i need to share my ice creams

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Leave a comment

« Who Rocks? Rogue Amoeba Rocks. The Power of Holding a Color »