Yahoo!7 Mail & Messenger Blog

Introducing Yahoo!7 Messenger 10 Beta

August 25th, 2009 Filed in: Announcements 2 comments

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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