Yahoo Messenger 4.0

CNET editors' review

Reviewed by: CNET Staff

Of all the chat clients tied to a portal, Yahoo delivers the most impressive messaging experience. Its network is intelligently integrated, its chat features are smart and intuitive, and its extras are often genuinely interesting. If you're a Yahoo user, you'll have access to all the information you store in your Yahoo profile, including your calendar, address book, and customized news. Messaging is about as straightforward as it gets, and message archives are handy, though not always easy to sift through. Though the program's animated emoticons and "IMVironments" could come across as cheesy and irrelevant, they turn out to be surprisingly winning. One great example of the integrated network supporting interesting extras is the Yahoo Photos IMVironment, which lets you share photos you have stored online right in the messaging window. Alas, ads appear in the multiuser chat window, although thankfully not in the one-to-one messaging window. The latest version of YIM offers VoIP calling to other Yahoo users and allows you to leave voice messages and check call history. Watch the CNET video review of Yahoo Messenger:

Publisher's description

From Yahoo :

Yahoo Messenger (formerly known as Yahoo Pager) is a free service that allows you to see when friends come online and send them instant messages. It can also alert you to new mail in your Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Personals account, or when you have an upcoming meeting recorded in Yahoo Calendar. Yahoo Messenger offers firewall support; a standby mode that minimizes the program until an Internet connection is made; the ability to save and print your conversations; and a tabbed interface that provides quick access to your favorite stocks, news, and sports scores (see screenshot). Other features include the ability to create a chat room automatically, stock price alerts, the ability to send messages to friends even if they're not online when you are, a Quick Compact mode that hides the Messenger tools to maximize your viewing area, Messenger Themes, the Online Presence, a small HTML "button" you can put onto your Web site to allow your Yahoo buddies to instantly see if you are online, and voice chat, which allows you to talk for free to anybody else on the Internet. If you have a microphone and speakers, you can talk to other people on Yahoo with no long-distance charges. A list of new features can be found here.

The newest version of Yahoo Messenger adds international phone call capability, a recent history/message archive, nicknames, and more.

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