Yahoo to Launch Messenger API

Yahoo Messenger is one of the most popular instant messaging services in the world and, even though IMs are not exactly ‘hip’ these days, it still counts hundreds of millions of users. And, while this type of services originates from a long-forgotten era of the web, Yahoo is at least trying to keep up with the times by releasing a Yahoo Messenger API.

“Yahoo! will soon open up the platform behind the popular Yahoo! Messenger service. This is big news. If you haven’t used Yahoo! Messenger, you’re in for a treat. Yahoo! Messenger is the premier instant messaging (IM) platform, used on a wide variety of desktop and mobile clients,” Dudley Wong, product manager at Yahoo, wrote.

“Millions of users throughout the world already depend on Yahoo! Messenger to manage their social contacts, group lists, and presence information; hold real-time instant communications; and perform data transfer to and from contacts throughout the world. All, well — instantly, as its name says,” he added.

Yahoo says it will open up the platform to outside developers. A full RESTful API will be made available to enable developers to take advantage of everything Yahoo Messenger can offer. It’s unclear what features Yahoo plans to open up, but it looks like developers will have a pretty free hand.

The Messenger API isn’t here yet, Yahoo is just making the announcement and it says there will be more info on the release on June 30. At that time, developers should be able to get a better view of the capabilities of the API and some of the more gory technical details.

The API is aimed mostly at web developers, but that’s not really surprising, considering all the buzz web apps are generating. Still, Yahoo says that developers will be able to use any programming language they wish, though some components will have to be designed with HTML and JSON.