Yesterday Yahoo launched the beta version of the Yahoo Messenger 9. Most noticeably you would see apart from the eye candy the new client houses lots of improvement then its older brother.

The coolest feature that i have encounter is that you don’t have to now leave your chat conversation window to watch videos from sites like Youtube, yahoo videos. Also inside the chat window you could preview images and maps.

Now you can share your Flickr photos with your friends or save the shared photos directly into your Flickr account. Way back in June Yahoo! held the “Emoticontest” from which several new emoticons have been integrated into the new messenger.Also now you can use the emoticons in your status window to show your mood to your friends.

Another nifty feature is the ability to forward incoming calls to either to your landline or another cell number. But the call forwarding is a paid option via the Phone Out account and you will be charge each time you use call forwarding. Also offline messages can be forwarded as SMS to your mobile phone. The new messenger comes with 7 skins which can be selected clicking the dot at the top right corner of the messenger window.

But sometimes the messenger’s CPU usage goes upto 99% apparently for no reasons at all. As a beta these kinds of minor problems are associated with it. I haven’t extensively tested it yet so appart form the CPU usage problem nothing buggy. All in all Yahoo Messenger 9 seems a worth successor to its older messenger 8 brother. Her’s a video to roundup all the features mentioned.

Yahoo Messenger 9 works on XP and Vista. Download it over here.[Via: Yahoo Messenger Blog]