Yahoo! Messenger

• Viewing your contacts by their Yahoo! ID vs. their full name or nickname. We've added this preference back in to the product. Download this latest version, then go to Messenger > Preferences > Appearance.

• New expanded contact list. If you're finding that this new look is too spacious for you, go to the Contacts menu and select Compact List. This will reduce the size of the Avatars and condense the height of your list overall.

• Message formatting in the IM window (the line break after the name rather that starting text on that first line). We've developed a set of handy keyboard shortcuts to give you some other options for your IM window. The shortcuts are a temporary fix; we'll build something more permanent into a future release of 9.0.

• Installation problems for Windows Vista users. In this latest refresh, we've made changes to the Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta installer that should fix most of the Vista errors. If you're on Vista, please give it another try and use our feedback page to let us know if you still encounter issues.

• Games are missing from the IM window. There were some changes to the Yahoo! Games platform that required us to remove them from this version for awhile. We are trying to get them back into a future release of 9.0; we'll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you love your Pool or Checkers, we recommend returning to Yahoo! Messenger 8.1.

• The LAUNCHcast plug-in, along with all the other plug-ins like Yahoo! 360, still work in 9.0! Just click the Plug-ins button near the bottom of your Messenger window to find them.

There are also a few things about Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta that you may not know about. One is that 9.0 is the first version of Messenger that is unicode compliant. This means that it supports IMs and status messages in many more languages than before.

A few other interesting tips& 9.0 will remember your status between sessions. So if your status on a Saturday night says Partying like it's 1999!, be sure to change it when you get to work on Monday. Also, if you have both a Yahoo! and a Windows Live ID for a friend, your friend will appear in your contact list only once. To IM your friend on the Windows Live network, click the drop down arrow next to the IM button below their name when you hover on them.

And lastly, if you usually show both online and offline contacts in your list, you can set a preference to bold your online contacts to help distinguish them. You'll find that preference under Messenger > Preferences > Appearance (Show online contacts in bold text).