Yahoo have scheduled some maintenance to Yahoo! Messenger starting at 5pm Pacific time (June 5). Yahoo! anticipate that this maintenance will be complete by 9pm Pacific time that same evening.

During there maintenance period, some Yahoo! Messenger users, especially those on version 8.0 or earlier, may be logged out of the product unexpectedly. If this does occur, you should be able to log back in immediately. In addition, users on older versions may have trouble using certain features like file transfer, mobile IM and display images.

If you are using Yahoo! Messenger 8.0 or earlier, Yahoo recommend upgrading to 8.1 or 9.0 Beta to avoid any interruptions during the scheduled maintenance. Or alternatively, you can use Yahoo! Messenger for the Web.

We apologize for any inconvenience you may experience during the maintenance and appreciate your patience.

Today yahoo 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. They 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 they 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 they made two views available for your contact list - detailed or compact. In this latest version, they 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. they will 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
Yahoo know there Windows Vista users have been waiting a really long time for this. They have 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). They 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: http://messenger.yahoo.com/download/win

Say the word “Beta” when it comes to Yahoo! messenger and people will run in the other direction and who can blame them? They are always causing people issues and are bloated with new stuff you don't want to use! Here is my top 5 reasons not to try 9.0 Beta!

Reason 1: Lack of security fixes i give them a bit of credit they have some new security stuff but they have still not fixed the security bugs that people have been complaining about for years and years. One great example is people can easily tell if your online by putting your yahoo id into a peace of software which uses the imv feature to tell if your truly online or not even if you have set your stealth settings for the user, even if you have your status set to invisible and better yet they don't even need to have you added to there friend list.

Reason 2: Not removing/fixing features that just don't work like voice conferences no one can get this to work for them maybe the odd time you will get them to work ok but for the most part people get no where Yahoo! need to start listening to peoples issues rather than adding all these extra features people don't want or need!

Reason 3: Crashing! this version is prone to crashing specially if you are running Vista, even if your on XP it will crash on you. There is the few people that have no issues with it crashing.

Reason 4: Skinning is very nice but needs allot more work lots of people have issues with it crashing when skins are installing or changed. Parts of the skins are not customizable such as voice.

Reason 5: Lack of ability to turn off the features you don't need or want! Granted many of the annoying things can be turned off but there still other features that people would love to be able to turn off but can't without running 3rd party software!

Lots of people have said i should mention the spam bots but this only effects chat not messenger even though chat is part of Yahoo! Messenger!

Yahoo! have released a updated preview release which has the following changes:

Performance & Stability improvements: They have improved overall responsiveness, including typing and switching between tabs and windows. In addition, they tackled some of the odd crashes that were occurring, so you should also find this version more stable overall.

A fresh look & feel for some areas: Attention all space-savers: now you can make the contact list even narrower. You’ll also find that some menus, like the display image picker, have been cleaned up and enhanced. Offline messages are more clearly displayed with a new “While you were out” tag and timestamp to denote the message. they also fixed a bug in the contact list so that when you choose to appear offline to a contact in your list, that contact’s name will become italicized (but remain bold).

Sidebar gadget reliability: For the people who had trouble loading and using the sidebar gadget that comes along with Yahoo! Messenger for Vista they have made some changes that should make it possible now to drag and drop a contact into the sidebar if you’re on a 64-bit version of Vista. They have also got rid of the red “X’ that sometimes appeared in place of a contact’s image.

Various bug fixes: They tackled a fix for some of the sign-in problems that have been reported from some users. they also fixed the bug where the message window wasn’t always scrolling down as the conversation progressed. And lastly, They have fixed the contact list to maintain the open or close status of your groups between sessions. So if you open or close a group in your list and then sign out, the next time you sign in, it will appear the same way you left it.

Screenshots: Login Window -- Main Window -- IM Window

http://messenger.yahoo.com/windowsvista.php

http://messenger.yahoo.com/download_vista.php

http://download.yahoo.com/dl/vmsgr/b1/us/y...ta_us_setup.exe