What’s new in Yahoo! Messenger 9?

Posted on November 30, 2008 at 5:14 am

Does Yahoo! Messenger 9 have what it takes to make you switch to a new version? Let’s see if you will be impressed by the new features and functions.

The changes in the interface are easily noticeable. The purple glass interface is in trend with current glass window interfaces. The avatars of each contact got bigger to easily see the customized avatars of your contacts. This maybe good for most users but for users who has a lot of contacts, this means they will have to scroll longer to find contacts.

To remedy this problem, a contact search bar is now available. Status messages are also easily changeable as the GUI provides editable status message textbox on the main window. The Pingbox visitors on your Pingbox appear as groups on your contact panel. (We have a separate article for Yahoo! Pingbox here)

Another cool feature is the “Address Book” group where you can see all of your offline contacts:

The avatar acts like a quick shortcut to access the actions available for your contacts:

The actual chat window interface has not changed that much but the new capabilities are actually good. When you paste a Youtube or other popular video site link or URL of a photo, the actual video or photo will appear on the chat box:

Under the hood there are some new notable features. You will be able to chat and swap files real time to other contacts using other networks like Windows Live Messenger. You can share pictures from your Flickr photos too and not just pictures from your computer.

Here are other new features based on the Yahoo! Messenger Wikipedia entry:

New skins
Return of the (original) emoticons
Ignore list enhancements
New emoticons inspired by our users
Import Contacts wizard
Yahoo! Updates
Call forwarding & new voicemail delivery
Yahoo! Games are back

Yahoo! Messenger 9 is a necessary upgrade for users inside private firewalls. If you receive a message from Yahoo! every time you login that says your current version will not work on current version, an upgrade is required. Lots of users also documented bugs on version 8 that were fixed on version 9 (i.e. broken file transfers). The new features and the bug fixes are enough reasons for me to drop the old version.

To get the new version, download the installer from this official Yahoo! Messenger website: http://messenger.yahoo.com/