Grown men will cry, women who don’t normally follow sports will become rabid with NCAA fever, and productivity in offices will take a hit as workers follow the games from their cubicles. Of course Yahoo! Messenger has a few items to further fuel your basketball obsession…

When it comes time to taunt your friends about their team losing or making a bad play, check out the NCAA audibles. There’s a referee ready to charge your friend with an offensive foul, a baseball cap-wearing superfan (complete with horn), and a laid back player who illustrates what it means when the defense is “taking a vacation”. To access the NCAA audibles, click the Audible icon in your IM window, click “More Audibles”, then “See All Audibles” and select NCAA Basketball (Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 or 9.0 Beta only).

You can also show your team pride by dressing the part. Head over to the NCAA section on Yahoo! Avatars to find jerseys from over 25 schools including Duke, University of North Carolina, UCLA, Kentucky and more.

To find out more about the tournament and follow all the action, check out NCAA Basketball on Yahoo! Sports. You still have time to pick your teams before the first game – download the tournament brackets: Men’s | Women’s

And if you’re on the go and want to follow what’s happening, go to http://m.yahoo.com/ncaa from your mobile phone for the latest scores and highlights.

Go team!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

Yahoo! has partnered with Diet Dr. Pepper for a Valentine’s Day promotion called “Valentine’s in Vegas: Marry my Avatar”. Type in the Yahoo! ID of the Avatar you want to get hitched to, and voila, you’ll see your betrothed avatars together in front of a Las Vegas wedding chapel (Elvis not included).

To make sure your Avatar is appropriately dressed before taking the plunge, head over to Yahoo! Avatars and enter “wedding” into the search box.

If your Avatar does elope to Vegas for a quickie wedding, it’s only right that you send out picture proof to your friends and family (or the paparazzi). Just click to share it on del.icio.us, Yahoo! Messenger or Facebook.

Check out the Valentine’s in Vegas gallery to see Avatars that have already tied the knot today.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

When you arrive in Avatar Towns, be sure to say hello to Jessica and get some directions on where to go. Once you’re in a shop, you’ll be placed on a modeling pedestal while you browse the racks. Click on items that you want to try on and you’ll see them appear on your Avatar. If you don’t like the item once it’s on, click on it again to remove it.

At the bottom of your pedestal are some helpful controls – Redo and Undo arrows, a Save button, plus a button to toggle your background on and off. When you’d done, click the Exit button to return to the main street where you can then head into other stores.

Avatar Towns is in Beta for now, but there are plans to roll out other towns so you can shop ‘til you drop. I just hope they add a spa – my Avatar is going to need somewhere to relax after all this shopping!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

P.S. - Into Star Wars? Check out the new collection of Star Wars avatar gear.

Apart from fashion buzz, designer and model profiles, event photos and videos, the site also featured a unique online contest, inviting users to vote for their favorite Yahoo! Fashion Avatar. Three top Indian designers – Malini Ramani, Raghvendra Rathore and Manish Arora – created their own personal version of a Yahoo! Avatar. Check out their designs and see who won.

For more India-inspired Avatar fashions, visit Yahoo! Avatars and search on “India”.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

The plug-in lets you makeover a friend’s Avatar and then send them your creation for consideration. Your friend can accept the makeover and apply the changes to their Avatar, or they can forego your fashion faux pas.

Even more fun is creating an Avatar for a friend that doesn’t have one yet. You get to start from scratch, choosing their gender, their hair, outfit, extras and more. My buddy John didn’t accept my gender-bending “RuPaul” inspired Avatar that I created for him, but he got a good laugh out of it. (You can change the gender of a friend’s Avatar even if they already have one).

Short on time? Just hit the “Makeover Magic” wand and let the plug-in create a wild new look. Once you’ve finished the makeover, click the “Send Avatar” button to start an IM to your friend that includes a link for previewing their madeover Avatar.

The Avatars Makeover plug-in is really easy to use and it’s a fun way to surprise a friend. Make changes by hovering on Avatar elements in the initial screen, or click on a category like “Change Apparel” to browse through many options. There’s even a search box so you can quickly find specific apparel or accessories (like a search on “tank” to find tank tops). Want your friend’s Avatar to be in a better mood? Click the smiley in the upper left to change it. And if you make a mistake or change your mind, handy Undo/Redo/Reset controls will get you going again.

Eventually someone will ask you “How did you do that??” To share the Avatar Makeovers plug-in, click the Options arrow in the upper right corner of the plug-in in your Messenger window and choose “Send Plug-in to a contact”.

Click here to install the Avatars Makeover plug-in (if your Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 is not running, go here to install). Now, go forth and make Yahoo! Messenger a more fashionable place!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

To get started, visit the Export your Avatar page (you may need to sign in first). You can choose to export a small (48×48 pixels) or large (150×235) version of your Avatar in JPG or PNG graphic format. Then just copy the snippet of HTML code that’s provided and drop it into your blog, MySpace page or other webpage to display your Avatar. When you update your Avatar on Yahoo!, it will automatically update on your page too.

You can also save the image of your Avatar to send in email, upload to your Yahoo! 360 profile, or even to use as a display image in another IM program. Visit the Download your Avatar page to get started.

One drawback to the exported or downloaded Avatar – it’s a static image that doesn’t animate with the facial expressions and moods that you normally see when you’re using Yahoo! Messenger. But leave it to our friends at WackyB to tackle that challenge and find a solution! Check out the WackyB article “I’ve borrowed my Yahoo! Avatar” to find out how to embed an animated version of your Avatar into a webpage.

If you’ve got your Avatar appearing on your website or blog, drop us a note in the comments with the web address so we can check it out!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

Billed as an immersion trip, their goal was to observe and interview Vietnamese users using Yahoo! Messenger in different environments. They interviewed users from 16 to 25 years of age in their homes and in Internet cafes.

In Vietnam, Yahoo! Messenger is the most popular instant messaging application, and our users there are really enthusiastic about it. While we do offer Messenger in more than a dozen languages, we don’t yet offer it in Vietnamese, so these users all use the U.S. version.

Despite a possible language barrier, they take full advantage of Yahoo! Messenger and especially love the expression features like emoticons, audibles, Avatars, webcam, and IMVironments — they seem to use every feature we offer. Another thing we learned: Just changing the location of a single button in a new release can wreak havoc on their usage patterns!

The team met several users who were especially passionate about Messenger and Avatars. As thanks for their participation in the research, we wanted to do something special for them. So with a few snaps of the digital camera, we brought their images home and sent them to the Avatars team. Our artist went to work, and a few days later, their Avatars were born.

These new Avatars based on our Vietnamese friends will make their official debut on February 27. If you haven’t been by in awhile, check out our Avatars site. There are new accessories and outfits added often, so you never have to wear the same thing twice.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

UPDATE: The Vietnam avatar clothing is now available. Go to the Full Outfit category on Yahoo! Avatars to check them out.

If you do venture into Avatar World, be prepared to change your attire often to match your room (beachwear is a must). Customize further with commands like “decorate ferrari” which inserts a matching photo of a Ferrari car from Yahoo! Image Search into your room. Just replace ferrari with another item you want to put in your world.

For those of you interested in the technical details, Avatar World was created by Xavier Legros, Kai Arnold and Justin Willow on our platforms team (and even some debugging on my laptop). This plug-in leverages the powerful feature set of the Yahoo! Messenger SDK to offer features like file sharing and conferencing. To offer the floating user interface of Avatar World, the team used Win32 API’s to create transparent windows that host flash controls and in certain cases Internet Explorer controls to host HTML and JavaScript. Special thanks to Amanda Walker for creating the cool flash animations (those secret keywords…) and Matt Au for developing the original idea.

Give Avatar World a try and invite friends to your room for a group chat. Then let us know what you think of it here on the blog or in the Avatar World group. I’m off to find some new Avatar accessories…

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

P.S. – If you figure out any more of the secret words, let me know!