Top 5 questions on Ovi’s partnership with Yahoo!

Last week we announced our upcoming partnership with Yahoo! For Chat and Mail and since then you guys have been asking quite a few questions about how this new partnership is going to affect your service. So I have tried to answer the 5 most common questions in this blog post.

Hi everyone! My name is Jenny, and I work on the Ovi Chat and Ovi Mail team, based in Silicon Valley. I have young kids so I use email and chat to schedule play dates for the kids – trying to take advantage of the sunny and relatively warm northern California weather – and to make plans with my friends from my phone wherever I happen to find myself.

Last week we announced our upcoming partnership with Yahoo! For Chat and Mail and since then you guys have been asking quite a few questions about how this new partnership is going to affect your service. So I have tried to answer the 5 most common questions below:

Does this mean Chat / Mail is closing down?
Not at all and in fact it’s the opposite! Our partnership with Yahoo! will result in enhanced functionality for our Mail and Chat users beyond what is currently available. For example, Chat users will soon be able to invite Yahoo! Messenger friends into their Chat friend list, expanding the community of people with whom you can chat, and you’ll also be able to access Chat from the web so you can chat from a computer as well as your Nokia phone. And with Mail, we’ll leverage Yahoo!’s extensive experience with desktop webmail services, giving Mail users an enhanced webmail experience including tabs that allow you to work on multiple emails simultaneously, additional functionality such as themes, stationery, and advanced search filters, and an integrated Chat experience within webmail.

What do I need to do to keep my Chat / Mail working?
To be part of the Mail / Chat powered by Yahoo! service, you will have to accept the Mail and Chat by Yahoo! Terms and Privacy Policy. You can go to https://t.ovi.com, enter your Nokia account details and click next to accept the terms. And that’s all! We will handle the migration from there, and you will automatically be transitioned to Yahoo! and get to take advantage of the service enhancements as they are introduced in the coming weeks.

How does Chat differ from 3rd party apps like Nimbuzz etc?
There are some similarities between Nokia chat and these 3rd party apps but also some key differences that are good to know:

These apps offer multi-community support like our Chat application does, though the exact list of communities might vary from provider to provider. One key thing to know is that these 3rd party apps are not officially sanctioned to provide access to the various communities, meaning that they might be asked to remove support for specific community if the 3rd party isn’t adhering to standards expected by the communities. Many of the 3rd parties lack the deep integration with Nokia phones provided by the Chat app. One example of this in our most recent Chat client is the ability to update your Chat avatar directly from the phone camera or photo gallery. Another cool example is that if you are logged into Yahoo! or Windows Live, you can go directly from that IM community to the corresponding community email in-box without having to navigate from the Chat application to Mail first. 3rd party apps are typically not localized into as many languages, are less data and battery efficient than the Chat application. Ovi on your Nokia supports 32 different languages ranging from Arabic to Spanish and Finnish to Urdu. And finally, these 3rd parties do not support Ovi, which means they will not be able to deliver the benefits from Chat powered by Yahoo!

As a Chat user and someone working on the Yahoo! alliance, I am very excited about the changes and additional functionality that will come to Ovi in the coming weeks and months. So for me, the Chat access plus access to other IM communities plus the device integration available from Ovi makes it an easy choice to use the Chat application instead of other 3rd party apps.

What does this migration mean for the level of privacy protection for Ovi Chat users?
Some of you  have stated their personal concerns over user privacy and the way that various countries and companies treat user data and user privacy. While I can’t speak for all companies or all countries, I can say that we take user data and privacy very seriously and work very diligently to protect this information according to our own privacy policy. Nokia has chosen to partner with Yahoo! to power the Mail and Chat services because we believe that our 2 companies together can provide an enhanced service that will benefit our users, and we see Yahoo! as a trusted partner in delivering this service.

Will new Yahoo features like video chat be available to the Ovi Chat community?
I am very excited by some of the recent enhancements that Yahoo! has introduced for Messenger, and we are even more excited at the prospect of bringing those to Ovi as well! I can’t give you a specific timeframe for when they would become available, but we view these as valuable features for Chat users that we want to make available.

I hope that was helpful for you and answers all your questions, but if you want to ask anything else about the upcoming changes to Chat or Mail then please leave a comment for me below.

Source : http://blog.ovi.com/2010/11/12/top-5-questions-on-...