November 30, 2007 on 9:18 am | In Voice | 46 Comments
If you make PC-to-Phone calls on Yahoo! Messenger, you’ll love the two new features we’ve added to the Yahoo! Voice website.
A frequent request from our voice users is a complete call history. Good news! Now you can view your entire PC-to-Phone call history on the Yahoo! Voice website. Be sure you’re signed in, then click the “My Call History” link near the top of the page. You can view your calls by month in a list showing all calls, or in lists of just outgoing or incoming calls.
Each call history includes the date and time the call was made, phone number, location, duration of the call, price per minute and total charges. The call history automatically displays your fifty most recent calls; click the page numbers near the top to go further back in your history.
The call history on the Yahoo! Voice site only includes PC-to-Phone calls made through a Phone Out account. To view recent call history for your last three hundred calls, including free PC-to-PC calls, click on the “Contacts” menu in Yahoo! Messenger and select “Call History”.
We also made the auto-recharge option for your Phone Out account more customizable. In the past, the Auto-recharge amount would automatically default to the last amount for the Phone Out purchase that you made. But now you can specify either $10 or $25 as your auto-recharge option. Just visit the Yahoo! Voice site, be sure you’re signed in, then click on the “My Services” link near the top of the page.
Speaking of Yahoo! Voice, we have a 2nd birthday coming up!
In December 2005, we began offering premium voice services in the Windows version of our product. You can use Yahoo! Voice services to make free PC-to-PC calls to other Messenger contacts, or purchase a Phone Out account to call your friends’ mobile or regular phones from Messenger for as low as 1¢ a minute. We also offer
Phone In accounts, allowing you to purchase a phone number which you can use to receive calls right in Yahoo! Messenger. With the recent release of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta, call forwarding was also introduced, allowing you to forward incoming calls to your Yahoo! Messenger to another phone number, even if you’re signed out.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
November 27, 2007 on 9:50 am | In 9.0 version, Fun Stuff | 289 Comments
Are Yahoo! Messenger users emotional? You bet. With our latest release of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta, we included six new emoticons inspired by users who entered our Emoticontest held over the summer.
Renata, a 31 year-old financial analyst living in Egypt, submitted the “thumbs up” emoticon which she says was inspired by the movie “Borat”. “My 4 year-old son saw a couple of (allowed) scenes and he wanted to imitate him.” Renata adds that in her home country of Macedonia, “we use two thumbs up whenever we want to say that someone has done a good job.”
Eunice S., a 22 year-old IT project manager from the Philippines, submitted the “It wasn’t me!” emoticon for all of us who may need to “look guilty in a funny way”. Eunice says “I would use my emoticon when someone’s blaming me of something I’m not responsible of. But, it can also be used by guilty people who are trying to deny something they actually did.”
11 year-old Daisy J. from Seattle, WA submitted the useful “Hurry up!” emoticon, which you can use in a number of ways to get your friends moving. Daisy said “I can never get my friends to leave…so now I can use my emoticon.” Daisy’s favorite emoticons? The big grin, nerd and “talk to the hand”.
Rose M., a 25 year-old marketer from Santa Monica, CA sent in the thrashing “Rock on!” emoticon. Her inspiration? “People everywhere are listening to music while they are on the Internet… So many times I’ve wanted to express that ‘I’m Rocking Out’”. Well, Rose, we hope this does the trick!
The other two new emoticons in Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta are “Thumbs down”, submitted by Ryan L., and “Don’t want to see” from Nancy.Butterfly.
Thanks to all of our winners for their inspiring ideas. We hope everyone finds fun ways to express themselves with these new emoticons, available in the emoticon menu of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
P.S. - The text equivalent for the bee is :bz
November 21, 2007 on 1:40 pm | In Mac version | 108 Comments
The third update of Mac 3.0 Beta 2 (build 78326) is now available to keep you company over the holiday weekend.
There are no new features in this update but we fixed a couple of crash issues, including an update to the crash reporting for Leopard users.
We also made improvements to the sign in process when you’re behind a firewall. So if you’ve had issues in the past with signing in from the office or elsewhere with a firewall, please try installing this new update.
Download Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 beta 2
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
November 20, 2007 on 9:31 am | In Voice | 14 Comments
In response to requests from our Yahoo! Voice users, we recently made some changes to the Yahoo! Voice website. Now it’s even easier to check rates and if you’re unfamiliar with Yahoo! Voice, you can even test the quality of a real PC-to-phone call for free.
Usually, seeing is believing. But when it comes to making phone calls over the internet, hearing the call quality is the true test. For awhile now, users have been able to call toll-free numbers from their PC for free using Messenger. With these recent changes, we also added a “Test a Free Call” feature to our website.
If you’re considering a Phone Out account, but don’t want to commit without first testing our sound quality, then you’re in luck! To test a free PC-to-phone call, visit http://voice.yahoo.com/ and click on the “Test a Free Call” link in the Phone Out section or on the lower right portion of the page. Or click here to try it now (you must be running Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 or 9 for Windows).
We’ve also made it easier to check calling rates. Go to http://voice.yahoo.com/ and on the right side of the page you’ll see a box that says “Check low rates to anywhere in the world”. Select the country you’re interested in calling and our Phone Out rate calculator will instantly show you the rates for calls made from your home country (ex. U.S. to India).
And if the voice quality and rates are enough to make you want to start calling around the world, just click the Sign Up button to create your account. Phone Out services are available to users on the following versions of Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 and 9.0: U.S., Singapore, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
November 15, 2007 on 10:00 am | In Web version | 32 Comments
[This was posted briefly a few weeks ago but I decided to pull it and repost now that the My Yahoo! Beta is available to everyone. - SB]
A new Yahoo! Messenger module is available for users of My Yahoo! Beta. If you’re not familiar with My Yahoo!, it’s a Yahoo! service that lets you customize a page with modules of your favorite content from Yahoo! and around the web, including weather, news, movies, music, and more.
The new Yahoo! Messenger module embeds a lightweight Messenger window right into your My Yahoo! Beta page. See which friends are online and send and receive IMs, all without leaving the page. Note that to use this module, you need to be using the latest Beta version of My Yahoo! (http://beta.my.yahoo.com).
The My Yahoo! Beta is available to brand new users of My Yahoo!; existing My Yahoo! users can move over to the new Beta by visiting http://cm.my.yahoo.com/upgrade.
To add the Yahoo! Messenger module to your My Yahoo! Beta page, click the “Personalize this Page” button at the top. Click the “Add Modules” link under Content, and then do a search for Messenger. From the search results, click the “+ Add” button next to Y! Messenger. Then be sure to click the “Sign in” link in the Messenger module to make yourself available (or invisible). You can place the Messenger module in the larger middle section of your page or drag the title bar to place it in the more narrow, right hand column on the page.
The My Yahoo! Beta module is a lite version of Yahoo! Messenger, so it won’t have all the bells and whistles of the full, downloadable version. Things like status messages and emoticons are a little more limited. Access to your contacts and conversations are organized by a simple tab structure on the left hand side. When a new message comes in, the tab flashes and text scrolls in the My Yahoo! taskbar button at the bottom of your screen (handy for when you’re using another window when an IM arrives).
Ready to try it? Click here to add the Messenger module to your My Yahoo! Beta page.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
P.S. - For more info on the My Yahoo! Beta, be sure to check out their blog.
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