Yahoo today released Yahoo Messenger 9 Beta with lots of exciting features for photo and video sharing. Yahoo Messenger is one of the most popular IM clients and is used by millions of people to converse with friends, family and colleagues.

Here are some of the Notable features that Yahoo Messenger 9 sports;

Flickr Photo Sharing

In addition to the desktop photo sharing Yahoo Messenger 8.1 had Yahoo Messenger 9 now allows you to share your Flickr photos with Yahoo contacts. You need to grant the Yahoo Messenger permission to use Flickr Stream to share photos first.

View Videos / Maps Inside Messenger Window

This is one more cool feature which I liked a lot which allows users to view videos right inside the messenger window itself. This is a neat feature as now you will not have to leave your the messenger window to watch videos sent to you by your friends and can enjoy it all in the comfort of your messenger itself.

Another thing I liked about this feature is that, it automatically detects the link and displays the video player without you having to do anything additional. It currently supports most of the popular video sites such as YouTube, Yahoo Video etc.

Forward Offline IM’s to SMS

Older Yahoo Messengers had a feature which would show you offline messages as soon as you logged in to the IM client. With Yahoo Messenger 9 you can now forward all your offline messages to your cell phone as an SMS. Pretty useful if you are expecting some important message from a friend and are unable to get online.

Better Contact Management

The new messenger sports a better contacts management, where you can view avatars of your friend, quickly send them an SMS, email or IM message. All your non IM contacts are now available as a separate group called Address Book doing away the tab that was available in the earlier version of YIM.

Gtalk Feature: Grouped Entries for Continuous Messages

Another new feature in the Yahoo Messenger 9 is a feature that already existed in Gtalk. In Gtalk when a person typed continuous messages without receiving a reply the messages is grouped together under a single entry. In older Yahoo Messengers every time you typed a message your id used to be shown along with the message.

Yahoo Messenger 9 now has the same feature as Gtalk and now shows continuous messages typed by the user without a reply as a group under a single entry. This helps in the conversation and makes reading easier. Check screen shot below.

Other Features

There are few other features in the new Yahoo Messenger 9 like new smiley’s, additional skins and localization version in more languages such as Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India (Hindi), and Vietnam.

My $0.02

The YIM 9 beta is a huge improvement over the earlier version and aims at making the IM a hub of social networking allowing you to share images and videos all within the IM client itself. I have been using it for the past 7 hours now and it works pretty smooth without any crashes yet.

The previous beta they had released for YIM 8 had lots of problems including crashes and incompatibility with old Yahoo version while sharing files. This version looks pretty much stable for a Beta.

Download the Yahoo Messenger 9 Beta or view a tour video of the latest messenger.

What are your thoughts about the new Yahoo Messenger 9 Beta? Has anyone suffered crashes yet? Do let me know through your valuable comments.