Release Of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta

Sarah Bacon, Product manager at Yahoo! Messenger, announced the launch of a new update to Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta. This version includes a few new features along with bug fixes, stability and speed improvements, plus some changes to the contact list. Sarah Bacon gives you a quick view about new features on Yahoo! messenger blog :

Bigger emoticons

They’re not massive, but a little bit bigger so you can express yourself with more oomph.
( vs. ). A few more are also enabled for use in your status message.

Games are back!

You probably missed them in the earlier releases of 9.0, but games are now back! Click the new “Activities” button while you IM to choose a game to play with a friend (or for a plug-in). Checkers, pool, toki toki boom…you know the rest. Note that your friend needs to be on 8.1 or this latest release of 9.0 Beta to play games with you.

Status message improvements

The status message menu has been split into two parts - one where you can indicate your availability (busy, available) and the other for putting in a custom message or a link you want to share. That way even if you’re away from IM, you can still share a funny thought, webpage or video with your friends via your status message.

Yahoo! Updates

Yahoo! Messenger is one of the first products to showcase what your friends are doing on Yahoo!. When a friend buzzes a favorite news story or changes their Avatar, a Yahoo! Update is displayed next to that friend in your contact list (with more detail in their contact card). So even if you’re not actively communicating with them, you can still stay up to date with what they’re doing. To manage what Updates you broadcast, click on your display image in the contact list, then click the “Manage my updates” link.

New contact list format button

When 9.0 Beta launched first time, a lot of users weren’t crazy about the extra space in the contact list which was created for display images and status messages. So there were two views available for your contact list - detailed or compact. In this latest version, a button next to the contact search bar is added to change it, along with other settings like “Show Offline Contacts”.

Import Contacts - new & improved

Select “Import Contacts” from the Contacts menu and you can add friends from address books you have on other sites like Gmail, Orkut, Yahoo! Address Book, Hotmail, AOL and many more.

Voice in chat rooms for Vista users & faster Captcha process

A fix to this latest version of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta allows Windows Vista users on 9.0 to use voice in chat rooms (and conferences). Chat room verification process is also changed. You can now enter the Captcha code right in the chat room window instead of having to go off to another page. That's cool.

New IM notification toast

If your IM conversation window falls into the background, this new feature will make sure you don’t miss out on the latest message from your friend. When a new message comes in to the background window, a small notification will pop up from the lower right corner of your screen with the beginning text of the IM your friend just sent. (You can turn this off under Messenger > Preferences > Messages.)

If you’re in Colombia, Chile, Peru or Venezuela, then now you will have versions of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 in your local language.

To see some of these new features in action, watch the demo video below.

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