The updates feature in Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 allows you to share updates from a variety of outside sites and services with your Yahoo! friends.

When you elect to share your latest Twitter tweets with anyone, friends that have you on their Messenger contact list will be able to see them.

To start sharing your Twitter activity with your Messenger friends, first go to the Share More page on your profile and select Twitter from the list. You’ll be asked to enter your Twitter username. (Note that if you don’t see Twitter in the Share More list, you may already be sharing your updates. In that case, move onto the next step below.)

Then go to the Manage My Updates page. Find Twitter in the list and choose one of three options from the drop-down menu:

Anyone – Your latest tweets will be shared with anyone who is connected to you on Yahoo!. That means friends on Yahoo! Messenger or friends that you’ve connected with on your Yahoo! profile.

My Connections – Your tweets are only shared with people you have explicitly connected with via your Yahoo! Profile.

No one – Your tweets will not be shared with any Yahoo! friends.

To share your tweets with all of your Messenger friends, be sure you select “Anyone” from the menu. Your latest tweet will appear under your name in their Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 contact list or on your contact card.

Happy tweeting!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

This week we are expanding the types of updates that can be shared with your Yahoo! Messenger friends. Now when you make updates on the Yahoo! network at places like Yahoo! Movies, Sports, Shopping, Travel, or on other social websites like Twitter, YouTube, Last.fm, and more, you can instantly share it with your friends on Yahoo! Messenger. All told, you can now share updates from dozens of Yahoo! services and nearly twenty non-Yahoo! websites (full list at the end of this post).

To get started, you need to have a Yahoo! profile (it’s free). Once you’ve set that up, go to the Manage my Updates section where you can indicate the sites from which you want to share updates. For non-Yahoo! services, located under “Share More”, you’ll also need to indicate your username. If you tend to use the same username for various services, our handy tool can quickly find your accounts.

TIP: When you’re on the Manage my Updates page, be sure to click the “Show All Yahoo! Sources” link to view all the Yahoo! sites that offer updates. And for the non-Yahoo! sites, click the “Share More” tab to view what’s available

For each site, you’ll see a list of the kinds of activities that will be shared. For example if you rate a movie on Yahoo! Movies or upload photos to Flickr, that will generate an update to your friends. Similarly if you upload a video to YouTube, tweet on Twitter or listen to music on Last.fm, those updates can be shared with your friends on Messenger.

For each site, there are different sharing options (including None if you don’t want to share updates from a particular site). In order to share an update with your friends on Yahoo! Messenger, make sure that you select “Anyone” for that site. By default, Yahoo! sites are already set to share your updates with anyone (at the time you make the update on a particular Yahoo! site, you’ll be notified that it’s going to be shared).

When you make an update on Yahoo! or on another supported site, it will appear below your status message on your friend’s contact lists (if they’re using Yahoo! Messenger 9.0). Here’s an example showing Dee’s latest update from Twitter:

The message below a friend in your contact list shows their latest update. To see their last ten updates, click on their display image and look at the list in their contact card.

Similarly, you can also see your own recent updates by clicking your display image at the top of the Messenger window to reveal your contact card. Your contact card also has a handy “Manage My Updates” link in case you need to make changes to what updates you’re sharing and with whom.

Updates are a great way to share what you’re up to with your friends. Now when you do things like rate movies, upload videos, comment on blogs, listen to music, or review a local restaurant, your friends can get in on the fun.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

P.S. – We realize not all users like to share online. So if you’re not up for sharing any updates, just go to your Yahoo! Profile and uncheck the “Share My Updates” box at the top of the Manage My Updates page. But take a look at the list of services – you may find one you want to share with your Messenger friends.

List of supported sites
Updates from dozens of Yahoo! services are supported including Movies, Sports, Games, Video, Answers, Buzz, Local and more. Visit Manage My Updates to see the full list of Yahoo! sites that are supported (be sure to click the “Show All Yahoo! Sources” link).

Below is the list of non-Yahoo! sites that we currently support. More services will get added so check your Yahoo! Profile page regularly to see what’s new!

Even if you don’t personally use Twitter to communicate with friends, it can be a fascinating place to see what other people are talking about. Enter Yahoo! Sideline, a new desktop program that allows you to create and group custom Twitter searches by topics of interest. Here’s how it works…

Download Yahoo! Sideline

After you install Sideline and open up the program, you’ll be in the Trends tab. This is a list of popular topics on Twitter by keyword. When I first tried Sideline this week, I was intrigued by a trend on the list, “Susan Boyle”, so I had to see what all the buzz was about (I’m glad I did!). If you see a trend in the list you want to keep tabs on, click the “+” sign to the right. That will add it as its own tab so even if the trend falls off the top list, you can still track it on your own.

The real power of Sideline comes when you customize it to keep tabs on your own interests. We launched our new Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone app last week so I wanted to see what the Twitter community was saying about it. I clicked the “+” sign at the top near the group tabs, and entered a name for my search group (Messenger). Then I clicked the “Add Search Term” button on the right. From there, I entered the keywords I wanted Sideline to search for in the Twitter stream such as “yahoo messenger” and “messenger iphone”.

There are also “Advanced Search” options which let you select additional criteria for your search such as attitudes (positive or negative tone of comments), specific people (you’ll need to know their twitter IDs), and phrases and tags. All in all, a good set of filters to help you zero in on the tweets you care about most.

You can also add multiple search terms for a group; as you add them they stack up on the right hand side. For example, I could also add a search for one of our competitor’s iPhone apps if I wanted to keep tabs on that.

You can keep Sideline open on your desktop and it will refresh automatically with the latest tweets that match your search (or click refresh to hurry it up). Each group tab updates with the number of new matches that it finds.

When reviewing the tweets in a group, you’ll see two icons to the right – a star and a talk bubble. Click the star to add it to your Favorites tab, or click the talk balloon to reply to the tweet via Twitter.com (you’ll need a Twitter account). You can also click on the ID of the tweeter to visit their Twitter page.

We hope you enjoy playing around with Yahoo! Sideline. For a further deep dive check out this video review/demo. And if you want to give the Sideline team your feedback, you can connect with them on Twitter.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

Error: The last address book operation did not succeed due to a server error (-40402)

As you may or may not know, Yahoo! Messenger is integrated with the Yahoo! Address Book (part of Yahoo! Mail). As a result, when they are doing any kind or maintenance, upgrades or server work, it can result in some Yahoo! Messenger users encountering errors when they try to make changes to their address book content.

Currently, the Yahoo! Address Book team is upgrading some of their servers over the next few weeks. As a result, you may occasionally run into these types of errors.

As a workaround, you can try the edit again later in Yahoo! Messenger or to make your changes right away, head over to http://address.mail.yahoo.com and make your changes directly on the Address Book site.

Again, these types of errors are usually temporary and can be worked around by making changes directly on the Address Book site. Thanks for your patience,

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

To add a Pingbox to your page, visit the Yahoo! Messenger Pingbox application page on Facebook. The same customization tools are available in the Facebook version, so you can personalize your online and offline greeting, choose from dozens of designs, and if you wish, require your visitors to give themselves a nickname before they can IM you.

With the Pingbox app, your friends can IM you from your profile page even when you’re not on Facebook.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

I gave it a test run to see how it did with archiving my Yahoo! Messenger conversations. The first step was to sign in with my Yahoo! ID and password. After that, I had to download and install a small Dexrex extension file to enable the capture and archive of my IM conversations in real-time. Installing the extension was painless and immediately, my IM conversations were captured in the background and uploaded to my dexrex.com account.

There is also a link to import your old IM conversations. After installing Java 6 on my PC at their suggestion, a scan was started to find the archives on my PC. It hung and didn’t really work for me, but in theory, you can get your old conversations imported and stored in your dexrex.com account.

Once your conversations are archived, you can use dexrex.com’s search box to quickly find a message. Dexrex has some handy automatic filters like one that lists out web links from your conversations. So rather than trying to remember a website a friend sent, just glance at the “Links” section in the sidebar to find it. They do the same auto-filtering for phone numbers and email addresses that appear in your conversations.

Dexrex also offers the ability to share a conversation with friends. When you click the “Share” link under a conversation, a page appears offering you a URL you can then send out to friends. When friends visit that URL, they’ll be able to read the transcript of your IM conversation on dexrex.com. If you change your mind, there is always a “Stop Sharing” button to make the conversation private again. You can also edit individual conversations to remove lines or to delete the entire conversation.

And finally there is an “Analyze” tab on the site where they’ll show you interesting statistics and trends about your conversations (like the average number of messages you send and duration of your conversations). This part of the site did not load properly for me but it may have been due to me only having a few hours worth of conversations archived.

Dexrex.com can be very handy for helping you organize and access your IM conversations. The search function works well and considering it’s free, it’s a nice add-on to your IM program. Keep in mind that you are storing your private conversations on a website, so if you have concerns about maintaining ultimate privacy, dexrex.com may not be the solution for you. According to their FAQ, all messages transmitted from your PC to dexrex.com via the extension are encrypted and there is an additional “Lockdown” feature you can add to your account for extra protection.

I was impressed by the ease in which I could search, filter, edit and delete conversations. In addition if you change your mind about using dexrex.com, there is a “Delete Account” button under the “My Account” section which will wipe out your archive. If you do that, be sure to also uninstall the dexrex.com extension from your PC to prevent future archiving.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager