Yahoo! Press Releases

2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | 1997

New features include free worldwide voice calling, interactive photo sharing, tools to expand online communities and enhanced spam protection

May 18th 2005, Sydney – Yahoo! Australia & NZ has today announced the beta launch of the next generation version of its popular Yahoo! Messenger (http://messenger.yahoo.com.au) service.

The new Yahoo! Messenger will allow people to enhance their shared experiences with friends and family around the world with free PC-to-PC calls, a leading-edge photo sharing experience, easy tools to expand their friends’ lists and Yahoo! 360 community (http://360.yahoo.com), increased spam protection and much more.

With the introduction of these new features and services, Yahoo! Messenger is taking instant messaging (IM) to the next level by providing an all-encompassing, integrated communications experience.

Yahoo! Messenger continues to lead the marketplace by bringing together the most relevant features into one comprehensive IM suite and providing the greatest choice for consumers to stay connected to one another. The next generation of Yahoo! Messenger gives people easy and more personal ways to share experiences than ever before.

“We are committed to providing a world-class IM experience for consumers, and we will continue to enhance and extend voice services as a core component of Yahoo! Messenger,” said Cliff Rosenberg, managing director of Yahoo! Australia & NZ.

New enhancements to the service include:

Free Worldwide Calling and Voicemail: Building upon its history of providing voice capabilities, Yahoo! Messenger has enhanced its service to allow consumers to 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 a headset, microphone and speakers. Additionally, 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 personalise the PC-to-PC calling experience, people can customise 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.

Enhanced Spam Protection: For the first time, Yahoo!’s widely recognised 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. Because spammers are largely responsible for sending potentially harmful messages in IM, SpamGuard will help keep Yahoo! Messenger a safe environment.

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’ personalised 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 favourite pages, search results and search history.

Drag and Drop File Transfer: With an 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.