Create a unique avatar that screams YOU!
With a pool of over 30,000 items, you can uniquely customize your avatar with a vast array of virtual items, including clothing, accessories, hairstyles, and pets. Chat and dance the night away with your friends, while earning coins for new items. As you level-up your avatar, you get to unlock exclusive new features – it’s easy and fun!

Design your own virtual space
Your OurWorld Condo can be decorated with furniture items that can be sized and moved around within your new virtual home to your heart’s content. Hang out with friends, dance, chat, and play mini-games to earn new furniture for your Condo.

Launching OurWorld IMVironment
While chatting with your friends, click on the ‘IMVironments’ button on the top-right of the chat window.  Simply choose the ‘OurWorld Condo Game’ icon, and in mere seconds, you’ll be chatting with your friend in your virtual Condo!

Check out the video here for a sneak peek into OurWorld.

Enjoy!

Yahoo! Messenger Team

We’re excited to introduce to you the Messenger Help Community!  In this new extension of Yahoo! Help, you’ll find a friendly environment where you can talk to real people like yourself, as well as members of the Yahoo! staff (yes, we’re real too). Whether you want to discuss features, seek help with an issue, or save someone’s day by sharing your wisdom and experience, there are a variety of discussion forums available to you. Come check it out!

While you visit, there are some features we’d like to bring to your attention:

Don’t miss out!
You can keep up to date with discussions by subscribing to them. Go to “My Subscriptions” and sign up to receive email notifications when posts are made to topics and forums that you’ve subscribed to. Have topics of your own? You can easily track these through “My Topics” and see what others are saying about your ideas and queries.

Boost your community status!
It’s easy to increase your reputation score in the community; just participate in a discussion to earn a variety of point awards. You’ll gain the most points when you successfully help others. A topic reply is good, a helpful reply even better, and a reply picked as a solution by the topic owner…the best.

Stay tuned…
These new community forums have only been open for a few weeks and already there are all sorts of great conversations going on.  We’re continually seeking ways to improve the features of the Help Community, so watch for updates and be sure to let us know what you think in our feedback forums.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you–come join the conversation!

Yahoo! Messenger Team

To read more about the new Y! Messenger Romanian version in Romanian click here.
[Clic aici pentru a citi mai multe despre Y! Messenger in limba Română]

Make sure to download the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger to enjoy all of its fantastic new features: http://messenger.yahoo.com

Yahoo! Messenger Team

For those heavy texters out there, we are excited to introduce Hub, a fast and easy-to-use mobile messaging app that allows you to send text messages and have group conversations for free. Hub allows you to easily add participants to any conversation thread so it’s easy to switch from private messaging to a group conversation. Whether it is just keeping up with a close group of friends or making spontaneous plans, you no longer have to deal with scattered messages.

What’s more, Hub allows you to send messages to anyone without incurring any text messaging fees. Yes, you heard us right. There are no text messaging fees – messages are sent over WIFI or using your data connection – and Hub is device agnostic, which means you can communicate with anyone on any mobile device as long as you have their mobile phone numbers. Your friends are not required to download the app in order to reply to your messages although they are strongly encouraged to do so in order to enjoy the full feature set!

Key features of Hub include:

• Group messaging: Enjoy group conversations with several friends at once
• Local and international SMS messages: Send text messages to other Hub users or any mobile phone for free†
• Privacy: Easily view and add participants to any conversation thread
• Message any phone: Your friends can reply with any SMS enabled mobile phone
• Instant notifications: Get push notifications for incoming messages so you never have to miss a conversation

Hub is currently in beta and is available for download on the Android Marketplace. We are extremely excited about this release and can’t wait for you to get started. Try Hub today and let us know what you think!

Note: Hub requires Android OS 2.1+ and is currently available only to users with a US SIM card and a text plan.

†This feature is currently available when sending to numbers in Canada, Indonesia, India, Kuwait, Malaysia, Philippines, Pakistan, Thailand, United States and Vietnam. SMS recipients may be charged by their carriers.

Yahoo! Messenger Team

Tabbed IMs – One of the most highly sought after features! We heard you loud and clear that being able to effectively organize and manage your conversations is important. No more clutter or juggling – with tabbed IMs, you get to chat with all your friends from one easy and convenient window..

Improved Spam Management – We hate spam as much as you do, and our battle against it is an ongoing one. If you have been receiving invitations from random strangers, you can now ignore multiple add requests with a single click.

New Social Games – Level up on how you are keeping in touch with your friends and family. With over 70 exciting games such as Backyard Monsters, Township and ourWorld, Yahoo! Messenger lets you chat and play games with friends at the same time! Get your friends involved by sharing your game activities and play-status so that friends can join your game and you can join theirs.

Easy Access to Recent Contacts – You may have over a hundred Messenger friends, but most of us chat with only a handful – and usually the same handful – on a regular basis. Your recent contacts now appear at the top of your contact list, so it’s quick and easy to reach out to your regular IM friends.

Smart Archiving – Looking up an old IM conversation has never been easier. Your chat history is now categorized by friends, with your most recent conversations showing up first. What’s more, your IM conversations can be retrieved from any PC or web browser where you have signed in to Yahoo! Messenger.

Snap and Share – Add more color to your chat conversations! In addition to photos, you can now take a quick snap shot of your computer screen and easily share it with your friends.

Quick Access to All Emoticons – Yahoo! Messenger has always had some hidden emoticons that weren’t available on the emoticon menu, which meant you had to memorize their shortcuts. Now you no longer have to rack your brain to remember the shortcut for the monkey emoticon (it’s, for those keeping score). The emoticon menu gives you quick access to all the emoticons, and even remembers the ones you use most frequently!

Now in Romanian too – Finally, we value all our users around the world and try as much as we can to deliver a truly local experience. With this new release, millions of users in Romania will now be able to use Yahoo! Messenger in Romanian by selecting it from the language box on the sign-in page!

Get the latest Yahoo! Messenger today at http://messenger.yahoo.com, we hope you’ll enjoy the new version as much as we do!

As with any new release, we want to hear all about your experience — what’s working well for you and what’s not. Try it today and let us know what you think through the “Send Feedback” link on the Help menu.

Yahoo! Messenger Team

***UPDATE***

It’s come to our attention from the Yahoo! Messenger Community that hackers are intentionally exploiting a newly-discovered security vulnerability affecting Messenger for Windows. At Yahoo!, we take security very seriously and we greatly appreciate those who flagged this to us. We are actively working to completely resolve this issue.  In the interim, we have pushed a fix that will protect users against this vulnerability. Messenger users need to log out of Messenger and then back-in for the fix to take effect.

• First and foremost, now you can continue to use a Web-based IM experience in Yahoo! Mail: Initially when we launched Yahoo! Web Messenger it was quite popular with a number of folks who didn’t want to install the Messenger client on their computer. Students, travelers and people who frequently used loaner computers understandably didn’t want to bother with the download, but still wanted an easy way to stay connected to their IM friends. Yahoo! Web Messenger was a perfect solution. But, thanks to the latest version of Yahoo! Mail launched earlier this year, users can now easily IM and SMS with Yahoo! Messenger in Yahoo Mail with only a web browser, centralizing their emails, IMs, and SMS messages in one easy location. This feature in Yahoo! Mail made Yahoo! Web Messenger somewhat obsolete.

• Consolidate resources to deliver a best-in-class instant messaging experience: Today Yahoo! supports Messenger on the Windows PC desktop client, Mac and mobile and tablet devices, including iPhone, iPad, Android smart phones and RIM devices to name a few. We’re seeing an increasing number of users on these products and we’re working hard to continually improve and enhance the innovative aspects of Messenger like gaming and video calls. By discontinuing support of Yahoo! Web Messenger, we’ll be able to reallocate resources to develop cool, new features for Messenger.

For all of the Yahoo! Web Messenger users out there, we encourage you to download the desktop client and see some of the enhanced features like chat with your Facebook friends. For those of you who don’t want to (or can’t) download Messenger on your computer, click here to find out how to use Yahoo! Messenger in Yahoo! Mail.

Thanks for supporting Yahoo! Web Messenger.

Yahoo! Messenger Team

We are committed towards improving the performance of our services and your continued patience is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Yahoo! Messenger Team

We’d like to invite you to participate in a quick poll so that we can better understand how regularly you are using the feature:

Looking forward to hear from you!

Yahoo! Messenger Team

Along with this update, we took the opportunity to add premium voice out to iPad.

At Yahoo! we are committed to deliver the best-in-class messaging experience. Download the latest version today and let us know what you think. Enjoy!

Yahoo! Messenger Team

Yahoo! Mail: Send mail to your friends directly from Apple’s Mail application. With our Mail service you can access your entire Mailbox and carry it anywhere you go. Read email on the web, on your phone, or on your Macbook and they all stay in sync.

Yahoo! Contacts: Yahoo! is the only partner that supports the tight Contacts service integration with OSX. All the Contacts in your Yahoo! Addressbook automatically flow down to your Macbook. The Contacts you add to your Apple address book are automatically backed up to Yahoo.

Yahoo! Calendar: Using Yahoo! Calendar with Apple’s iCal service enables you to streamline your life effortlessly. Share calendars with your family and stay in sync with them across your Apple devices or other Yahoo! Calendar enabled devices.

Yahoo! Messenger: Quickly chat real-time with your friends using Apple’s iChat product shipped with OSX. See which of your Yahoo! Messenger friends are online and reach out to them right from your computer.

Setup Yahoo! services on OSX Lion and instantly make your Macbook yours. Carry your information anywhere you go, and never lose your data backed up by Yahoo’s cloud services.

Yahoo! Messenger Team