Yuuguu Now Offers Screen Sharing For Any IM Protocol – Wise Decision

Even despite of the fact that we are supposed to move our computer-based tasks to online applications instead of using our desktop for anything but opening our browser, in many areas creators of web-based applications still want to rely on the desktop tools to penetrate deeper in our lives and turn us into loyal users.

This is especially visible in screen sharing and web conferencing solutions. First we saw it with Mikogo turning its screen sharing application into a Skype add-on for Skype users to be able to share their screens with other users provided that they both have the Mikogo add-on installed. On the next step we saw another screen sharing provider, Yuuguu, getting our of beta in October 2008 with Google Talk integration.

But today Yuuguu is making big news: with today’s release Yuuguu now supports virtually all the IM protocols you may need, including GTalk, Skype, Yahoo Talk, AIM, MSN, ICQ. The focus here is on integration with Skype as Yuuguu also serves as an add-on to Skype while other IM protocols are integrated into the Yuuguu desktop application itself. The advantage is obvious as such an integration allows you to combine screen sharing with Skype for voice without needing anything else to hold a virtual meeting.

It works pretty simple: once you sign up to Yuuguu via their new application (or log in if you already have login credentials), you will be offered to link the Yuuguu application to all the IM accounts you have. My IM accounts were connected to Yuuguu easily and Skype addon was not difficult to configure either.

The only problem for me is that Yuuguu behaves pretty aggressively towards any other IM clients you may use so when it runs on the computer, you will hardly be able to use other IM clients that you prefer as Yuuguu will behave as your preferred IM client - even if it is not.

So after all the IM accounts are configured in Yuuguu, this application will basically serve as a multi-protocol IM client (that does not look bad at all) and it will bring you messages from all your IM clients.

But of course a simple launch of yet another multi-protocol IM client is hardly any news as we already have tons of them and everyone who wanted to choose one must have found something to his or her taste already. Of course Yuuguu is about screen sharing, not about IMing and this is what this nice new application will let you do: share your screen with all your IM contacts instantly without needing to install or run anything else.

So whenever you want to share your screen with any of your contacts in any IM protocol (be it one person or a group of people), everything you need to do is launch Yuuguu, find the contact you need and initiate screen sharing process. The best part is that you can share your screen with any contacts and these contacts don’t even have to have Yuuguu installed - only the host needs Yuuguu to initiate virtual meetings. So when you begin screen sharing from within your Yuuguu application, it will start a simple chat with the selected contact and this contact will receive a message with a link he or she should click to access the online meeting with you.

Of course I have noticed some problems with the application. One of the worst ones for me is that they don’t support groups that you have for your IM contacts in the protocols. For me this was a nightmare as I have hundreds of people on my contact list and aggregating them into one huge long list does not really look like a wise decision because it will take some time for me to find the contact I want to IM or share my screen with.

But otherwise I like the idea that Yuuguu has implemented in this release of their application: people do need tighter integration with their desktop applications for certain things - and screen sharing is certainly one of such things. Besides, using IM and VoIP services combined in one application for screen sharing makes perfect sense simply because we all need to talk when having a virtual meeting. So while I won’t probably run Yuuguu constantly on my PC, I will not uninstall it either and will keep it for when I next want to have an effortless online meeting with some contacts of mine.