August 25th, 2009
Following hot on the heels of the announcement regarding changes to Yahoo!7 Mail, we are pleased to announce that the Yahoo!7 Messenger 10 Beta launch is also today!
The following announcement comes Sarah Bacon, Product Manager for Yahoo! Messenger:
Warm up your webcams because the all-new Yahoo! Messenger 10 Beta has arrived! This latest release is full of great new features. Without further ado, here’s what you’ll find inside:
High-quality video calls
We’ve completely redesigned our 1:1 webcam feature (under the hood too). Now you can make a high-quality video call to a friend with synched audio, right in the IM window. Features include the ability to swap video windows, position the video windows side-by-side, mute the call or place it on hold. You can even go full-screen with your video call. To get started, click the new “Video Call” button in the IM window.
Note that the friend you video call has to also be on Yahoo! Messenger 10. And these video enhancements are just for 1:1 video calls; broadcasting your webcam to multiple viewers (with no audio) has not changed.
New “Y! Updates” view of your contact list
People are busy these days, doing all sorts of interesting things online. To help you keep up with your friends, we added an alternate view of your contact list that shows a real-time stream of their updates, including Messenger status message changes. If they’ve opted-in to share their updates via Yahoo!, you’ll be able to see what they’re saying on Twitter, listening to on last.fm, and more.
Just like in the regular contact list view, you can easily IM a friend, start a video call and more, right from the Yahoo! Updates view. Or use the contact action bar to quickly find a friend without switching tabs.
We also added additional features for how and when you see your friends’ updates. When a new update comes in, a “toast” alert will pop up in the lower right corner of your screen. If you want to disable these, go to Messenger > Preferences > Yahoo! Updates. You can turn alerts on and off and even update preferences by contact or by type of update.
Download Yahoo!7 Messenger 10 Beta.
Find more to chat about
Within the new “Yahoo! Updates” view, you’re sure to find more to talk about with your friends. To make it easy, we added a hover menu that lets you quickly IM a friend about their update. When you do, the update appears inline in the conversation window, so when you start your IM with “I can’t believe you said that!”, your friend will know what you’re talking about. Note that your friend needs to also be on Yahoo! Messenger 10 to see the update inline.
New ways to sort your contacts
We added a couple new ways to organise your contact list. First is by recent activity which will list your friends with the most recent updates at the top of your list. We also added the ability to sort by availability, so if you usually show all contacts in your list whether they’re online or not, this will help bring the online friends to the top. Sort options are located in the drop down menu on the right side of the “Contacts” tab.
New icons in the IM window
We also added new icon designs to the toolbar in the IM window, and you’ll also find specific buttons for video calls and voice calls.
As with any new release, we welcome your feedback about what’s working well for you and what’s not. After using Yahoo! Messenger 10 Beta for a bit, go to the Help menu and select “Send Feedback” to get started.
Download Yahoo!7 Messenger 10 Beta.
We hope you enjoy it!
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
Wow, that’s a lot of new features!
Our team here in Australia, and the other Messenger teams across the world, have worked long and hard on the new version of Messenger. We hope you find the new Yahoo!7 Messenger experience better than ever 
Be sure to come back and tell us your favourite feature!
Happy chatting,
Kate – Yahoo!7 Messenger Team
August 25th, 2009
There are some exciting changes afoot across the global Yahoo! network today!
Firstly, we bring you the following announcement from John Kremer, the Vice President of Yahoo! Mail worldwide:
Over the past nine months, we’ve made some significant updates to Yahoo! Mail, making it more productive, more social and helping people stay better connected to those who matter most – but we only provided access to these new capabilities to a small group of you as we ramped up the features. Today, I’m excited to say we are bringing new and dynamic social functionality, third-party apps, enhanced photo sharing plus many more new features to all of your inboxes worldwide…yep, all 300 million of you!
Here’s what we are rolling out starting today:
A Streamlined Design:
First, we’ve swept away some of the ‘clutter’ to give you more space for what matters most to you. You’ll notice that we’ve moved your Calendar and Notepad apps into a new area called Applications, beneath your folders. The Applications box also includes the third-party apps, like Edit Photos by Picnik, PayPal, My Photos by Xoopit and Big Sender by Zumo Drive, that we started testing back in December. These apps allow you to organise and share photos, be more creative and be more productive.
You may also notice, we’ve removed the ads from the left hand column of the new Mail. This gives you increased space to view and manage all of your folders and applications.
A Better Way to Attach and Share Photos:
We recognise that sharing photos is a big part of what you do in Mail. So we’re introducing a better way for you to attach photos (and other files of course). With our new attachment feature, you will be able to drag and drop photos into your emails, upload multiple attachments and even upload whole folders at once. You will also be able to view thumbnails and rotate your photo attachments before sending them to your friends and family.
In addition to this, we’ve increased the attachment limit from 10MB to 25MB. Now you can share more of your photos at once. Coupled with unlimited storage, this means you never have to worry about where to keep your photos. You can keep them in your Yahoo! Mail for as long as you like.
More Social Features:
Users of both Classic Yahoo! Mail and the New Mail interfaces can take advantage of the new social features on the updated ‘What’s New’ page. And with hundreds of millions of people starting to participate in this social email experience, it can really get interesting. You can now stay up-to-date on what friends and family are doing online, and view the most recent emails from your contacts. Soon you’ll even have the ability to receive birthday reminders.
We’ve been listening to your feedback and know that you love the updates on the ‘What’s new’ page. Of course you have complete control to choose what to share by managing your updates.
Now for the Timeline
As with all of our releases we want to make sure that people around the globe continue to have a reliable Mail experience, so we will gradually roll out features out over time. The first users will start seeing these new features today and we will continue to roll them out to all of our Mail users over the coming months.
For more information and to read about other exciting changes at Yahoo! check out these posts from Yodel Anecdotal and our colleagues on the Search Team and the Messenger Team.
Well there you have it from the horse’s mouth so to speak!
Be sure to come back and let us know what you think of the changes
Happy emailing,
Kate – Yahoo!7 Mail Team
We’ve been listening to your feedback and know that you love the updates on the ‘What’s new’ page. Of course you have complete control to choose what to share by managing your updates.
Now for the Timeline
As with all of our releases we want to make sure that people around the globe continue to have a reliable Mail experience, so we will gradually roll out features out over time. The first users will start seeing these new features today and we will continue to roll them out to all of our Mail users over the coming months.
For more information and to read about other exciting changes at Yahoo! check out these posts from Yodel Anecdotal and our colleagues on the Search Team and the Messenger Team.
August 20th, 2009
We have noticed that Chat within Classic Mail is rather popular, and as such think you all may find the following tutorials about some of the more advanced features of Classic Mail Chat, of interest:
Happy Chatting,
Kate – Yahoo!7 Mail Team
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