Baap of all messengers is what I will call Yahoo!. I have been an active member of this ?establishment? for the past 4 years and using numerous other messengers in this span, I found Yahoo Messenger (YM) to supplement all of my needs pretty well. I got introduced to it by my friends, but that time ICQ was the major talk of the town. ICQ had a major problem in user interface, one of the hardest to use, and yahoo was emerging as a cute, cuddly, smiley laced, basic messenger. Though as a mail client yahoo didn?t offer much at that time. The concept was entirely new for me, virgin in approach, delightful in user-friendliness, and just unbelievable with the services being offered.
The best thing that happened to messenger was its constant updating, by a team of skilled programmers. With every edition they seemed to come up with something entirely new, stupendous in innovation, a treat for the user. It works well if you have an active email account in yahoo.
What I am writing about at the moment however is the latest yahoo messenger, version 6,0,0,1671. Although most of the important features are available in almost all the YM?s before this one.
Features:
1.Interface. Easy management of lists of your contacts, groupable, with your own customization of the name you want to see, instead of the sometimes misleading, confusing, user IDs. This is available only in yahoo, and nowhere else, and my life became really easy as I named my friends with the nicknames I wanted. Also it?s easy to identify if you have a BIG friends list, like me.
2.Avatar. There yahoo goes again with a Fantabulous imagination, and a cool new feature. Here you can create a custom avatar, person you feel you are, in the form of a cartoon, with everything available on the platter. Innumerable hair colors, clothes, accessories, backgrounds, faces, pets and lord knows what else. Its fun to dress up someone with this kind of variety and have it available for all your friends to see.
3.Emoticons. Now this age old feature just grows more and more delectable with each passing version of YM. It has amazing range of emotions, with perhaps every imaginable face on earth. I found this site awfully helpful with the emoticons,
https://wackyb.co.nz/index.phpoption=content&task=view&id=467&Itemid=367.
It contains all the hidden emotions also. In the new yahoo, if you have an avatar, then your avatar also does the same thing as the emotion being printed. Suppose if you use the smile face, then avatar also breaks into a smile.
4.Archive. This if enabled allows the user to store all the messages in the history to be referred to later if wanted, great help if you lost some no. or just want to relive the conversation. Something MSN started giving this month onwards only.
5.Offliners. Perhaps the best yahoo offers, you can leave offline messages to your contacts, which they get once they reopen their messenger.
However it works only if the contact has logged out properly, or else he will be
Shown online. The only glitch in messenger.
6.Voice chat. Easy to set up and easy to use is what it is. If you have a mic and headphones then it is a must, offering smooth transmission, almost replacing phone lines.
7.Chat rooms. Now this is a versatile tool, which can be used according to the need of the user, whether to find females for fun ;) or to share valuable insights over different topics listed in the window. You can also create your own room, but they are not of much use as they are dominated by perverts and psychos.
8.Yahoo mobile. Personally a very important and unparalleled feature in India. Using this you can configure your mobile for receiving messages on your mobile phone, wherever you are, and yahoo offers the biggest support for cellular operators.
The service tends to be a bit costly though.
9.Stealth. This sleazy feature is on offer in the latest version of yahoo and offers you to customize a single contact to see you offline, and thereby saving the trouble to appear offline to everyone. Works great for some annoying people.
10.Proxy. Yahoo offers support for proxy settings, and works virtually wherever, even places where MSN failed.
Services like audio taunts, IMvironments, yahoo games, personalized status messages, blocking services, profiles are also worth looking out for.
Conference, file sending, webcam, address book, are now virtually available on every messenger.
These are only a few features, but these are the ones which are useful to me, and I believe are universal in their applicability.
So if you still haven?t hooked yourself on to this happening stuff, then you better do so now, cause, believe me brother, you are missing out on some serious fun.
If anyone else has something more to add, then please care to leave a comment.
Happy messaging.
