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For the first time, AT&T Wireless Services telephone users can receive text messages sent directly to their phones by users of Yahoo's instant messaging service, even if the AT&T customer doesn't have a Yahoo account.

The new service, quietly unveiled by Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo last month, allows an AT&T Wireless phone customer to communicate in real time with a Yahoo Messenger user on a computer by typing text messages back and forth.

Mary Osako, a spokesperson for Yahoo, said the service is part of the company's strategy of extending Yahoo use beyond the desktop.

Going Mobile

The Yahoo Messenger client software now has a prominent button labeled "Mobile"; when clicked, it allows a user to send a text message to any AT&T Wireless customer, Osako said.

"We've made the mobile function very visible," she said. The button replaces a previous button that allowed IM users to initiate online telephone calls from the IM client. That service remains available but is now buried in a cascading menu.

"We found that the consumer experience of using text messages to communicate is appealing to a growing number of customers," Osako said.

Danielle Perry, a spokesperson for Redmond, Washington-based AT&T Wireless, said this is believed to be the first time that an online IM client has been able to connect directly with a cell phone customer for instant text messaging at the consumer level. "Nobody else had enabled that in the U.S. so far," she said.

Messages sent by the Yahoo IM user are free, while AT&T customers are charged 10 cents for received messages. Message plans, priced from $3 to $20 per month for up to 8MB of text data, are also available.

While AT&T Wireless customers have been able to receive text messages for about two years, the capability until now didn't involve real-time chat from a PC, Perry said.

"Instant messaging is pretty big online, and it's a natural thing now to make them mobile," she said.

Taking AIM

AT&T has an operating agreement with America Online, too, but that capability doesn't include real-time chat with AOL Instant Messenger users on AT&T wireless phones. Instead, AT&T users can use their AOL Buddy Lists (address books) to contact other AT&T Wireless cell phone users.

Neil MacDonald, an analyst at Gartner, in Stamford, Connecticut, said the new PC-to-wireless-phone capability is a positive move by the two companies.

This is a bigger step than the existing deal between AOL and AT&T, he said, because AOL customers can communicate with others on their phones only if the other user has an existing AOL Instant Messenger account. "This goes beyond that and doesn't require that you have a Yahoo account to communicate," MacDonald said. "It's an attempt by Yahoo to make a dent in AOL's dominance in the consumer space."

"It makes sense in the evolution of IM," he said. "People don't want to only use IM on PCs."

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