New release of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta

Today we launched 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. Here’s a quick look at what’s new:

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

Games are back!
We know you 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. We’ll add more types of updates in the future.

New contact list format button
When we first launched 9.0 Beta, a lot of users weren’t crazy about the extra space in the contact list we created for display images and status messages. So we made two views available for your contact list – detailed or compact. In this latest version, we added a button next to the contact search bar 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. We’ll pull in your contacts and make it easy for you to start talking with them on Yahoo! Messenger.

Voice in chat rooms for Vista users & faster Captcha process
We know our Windows Vista users have been waiting a really long time for this. We added a fix to this latest version of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta that allows Windows Vista users on 9.0 to use voice in chat rooms (and conferences). We also changed the chat room verification process. You can now enter the Captcha code right in the chat room window instead of having to go off to another page.

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