oneConnect: Yahoo! Messenger for the iPhone (and a whole lot more)

Today, Yahoo! OneConnect launched for the Apple iPhone. Built by the mobile team at Yahoo!, oneConnect is designed to help you communicate with not only your Yahoo! Messenger friends, but also the friends you have on social networks like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Youtube, Bebo, Dopplr, Friendster and Twitter.

Here’s a quick rundown of oneConnect’s top features:

Full address book
oneConnect integrates contacts from your Yahoo! Address Book, iPhone, and many social networks. To add social networks to your oneConnect, tap on the “Settings” icon at the bottom, then hit “My Accounts”. Once you’ve added a social network account, oneConnect will import all your contacts. Tap on the “Contacts” icon in the bottom bar to access them.

Send and receive instant messages, SMS
Once you sign in with your Yahoo! ID, your entire Yahoo! Messenger contact list will appear. Just tap on the “Message” icon in the bottom bar, then tap the “+” in the upper right corner to start a new IM (or start one from a friend’s listing under “Contacts”). You can insert your favorite emoticons into your conversation and you’ll see your Avatar or display image as well as your friend’s.

When you’re messaging, you’ll notice a “Y!” icon to the left of the text box. Tap on that and it changes to an SMS icon. When you want to send a SMS message, make sure the SMS icon appears there and just start typing. Note that you must have the mobile phone number for your friend already entered into their contact info. To go back to sending IMs, tap on the icon again to bring up the Y! icon.

Updates from your friends (Pulse)
In addition to IMs and SMS text messages, you can keep up with what your friends are doing on your favorite social networks. Tap on the Pulse icon to see a running list of updates from your friends. See the latest photos from your Flickr friends, get status updates from your Facebook contacts, or see what your Twitter buddies have to say. Different views let you look at all updates together, just status updates or just photo updates.

You can also update your own status on your social networks from oneConnect. When you’re in the Pulse area, tap the “My Status” button in the upper right corner. Enter a new status message and it gets sent out too all of your networks at once.

Yahoo! oneConnect is available for free from the Yahoo! Mobile website. To install it, click the “Get Yahoo! oneConnect” button on the page to access the oneConnect listing in the App Store on iTunes (or click here to launch it immediately in iTunes). It works on all versions of the iPhone.

Try it out and let us know what you think here on the blog or on the oneConnect Suggestion Board.

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