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.

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 > Alerts & Sounds.)

Download Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta

We've also welcomed some new countries to Yahoo! Messenger with this latest release. If you're in Colombia, Chile, Peru or Venezuela, we now have versions of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 in your local language.

User feedback is extremely important to us. We hope that after you've lived with this new version of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta for awhile, you'll stop by our feedback page and let us know what you like or don't like about it. You can also select "Send Feedback" anytime from the Help menu in the contact list window.

To see some of these new features in action, watch the demo video below. We hope you enjoy this latest version of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta!

Sarah Bacon
Product manager