New enhancements to the service include:
— Free Worldwide Calling and Voicemail(1): Yahoo! Messenger has enhanced its already popular voice service to allow consumers to far more easily call anywhere in the world for free through high-quality, PC-to-PC calling. Making calls over the Internet gives people more to talk about by being able to connect with friends and family while viewing photos, playing games, searching the Web and so much more. People just need an Internet connection and a headset or a microphone and speakers. Additionally, for the first time, voicemail messages can be left for friends who are away from their desks or offline, and can be easily retrieved through a call history log that displays all voicemail messages, as well as in-bound and out-bound calls. To further personalize the PC-to-PC calling experience, people can customize ring tones for their friends.
— Photo Sharing: Through an easy drag-and-drop photo sharing feature, experiences are brought to life within a mutual, interactive photo sharing environment. Like sharing photos in-person, consumers can communicate and point to aspects of pictures while viewing photos together.
— Tools to Expand and Foster Communities: A new set of tools has been introduced to let people effortlessly find, add to and share their friends’ lists. Additionally, through deep integration with Yahoo! 360, a community product that helps people keep connected and share content, people can invite Yahoo! Messenger friends to their growing Yahoo! 360 community. Also, those connected on Yahoo! 360 will now see new content indicators next to their friends’ IDs which give people instantaneous insight when new content — such as blog postings, photos, lists or profile data — is updated. Integration with Yahoo!(R) Music Unlimited, Yahoo!’s music subscription service, allows people to browse and listen to friends’ collections of music and playlists via Yahoo! Messenger.
— Enhanced Spam Protection: For the first time, Yahoo!’s widely recognized and highly-effective proprietary spam filtering technology, SpamGuard, will further bolster protection for Yahoo! Messenger users. With this new security feature, consumers will be able to report spam or unsolicited IM messages to Yahoo!, which will in turn help improve SpamGuard. Yahoo! Messenger will now be safer than ever, as SpamGuard further limits the number of potentially harmful instant messages sent by spammers.
— Contact Cards: Consumers can choose how they want to connect with others — whether it’s through text messaging, e-mail, mobile text messaging, or PC-to-PC calling — right from their friends’ list with one click. Additionally, people have one click access to their friends’ personalized Yahoo! 360 content right from the contact card.
— Compelling Search Tools: A prominent search field appears right in the conversation window to easily retrieve relevant Web search information from Yahoo! Search. Additionally, people can save URLs directly from the conversation window to their personal My Web page, a “personal search engine” that enables people to create their own personal online archive by saving their favorite pages, search results and search history.
— Drag and Drop File Transfer: With improved file transfer feature, people can easily drag and drop multiple files at once, and thumbnails will appear to specify which kind of document is being transferred (e.g. Word, Excel, photo, etc.).
— Easy Access Archiving: To ensure that people can easily access their previous IM text conversations, Yahoo! Messenger will give people the option to access previous interactions right in the conversation window.
— Customized Content: To stay on top of the latest in pop culture, most popular searches and entertainment news, people can choose to display the Yahoo! Buzz Index and Entertainment Tonight content tabs in their IM window. Additionally, people can create a Yahoo! 360 blast — a quick thought to share with their circle of friends — with the new Yahoo! 360 content tab. The new content tabs join the existing suite of customizable content including the Calendar, Games, LAUNCHcast Internet radio, News, Sports, Stocks and Weather tabs.
Download it now here: http://messenger.yahoo.com
Remember this is beta software, so there might still be some bugs they need to iron out.
