Yahoo! Depression™

Dep dep dep depression!

Not only am I depressed because of my own day to day life, but now Yahoo decided to depress me even further. Ever since I got Vista, I was anxious about the new Yahoo Messenger for Vista, of which I saw a presentation here. Useless to say that almost one year later that page hasn't changed a bit, and there is absolutely no news of the new program. I'm very satisfied with the 8.1 Messenger at the moment, but the new one would have improved the whole Vista experience thing even more. I mean come on, we all want cool smart looking stuff on our pcs. Not only is the project long overdue but it now seems to be dead and burried as Yahoo stopped it's developement and moved on to the new Yahoo Messenger 9.0 Beta Release.

I must say that at first when I heard about this I was actually happy. I said well they must have taken their ideas from the Vista one, integrated them with this one and so the new thing must be absolutely great. Unfortunately I was waaay to idealistic for Yahoo's standards.

Ok I don't want to be that mean, so I'll start with their ( one and only ) nice new feature: the "inline media player". The media player is integrated into the IM window so from now on whenever someone gives you a link to let's say YouTube you can view the movie directly in your window without having to open a separate browser. I understand the same happens for JPEG, GIF and PNG images. Yes truly a nice new feature, BUT i can already see problems with it. If you're anything like me, you'll have lots of people sending you lots of different video links, occasionally at the same time. From what I saw, even if it doesn't directly play the video it still loads the player for every link in every window. Now you get to fill up your RAM with only a few links. So where the hell did all my multitasking power go ?

  Enough with being nice. I've waited a really long time for a new Messenger ( 1 year , Yahoo Messenger 8.1 came out in Q4 of 2006) and they really disappointed me. Let's start with the beginning. Yahoo Messenger 9 offers a cool new user interface ..NOT. It's exactly the same interface just that they moved the avatars on the right side and made them somewhat bigger. Great now we can all perfectly see the "Yahoo Sucks MSN Rulz " pictures better.
  Another thing they added is the hover options. If you hover your mouse on a contact some action buttons will appear such as IM , E-mail and Call. Perfectly useless as we already had those action buttons in 8.1 next to the pop up thing remember ?
  Talking about useless, the new Messenger automatically creates a new group for you with all your address book contacts so you can now scroll 80 pages down if you want to look around in your contacts. Again Mess 8.1 had this done in a much more subtle and nice way: the icons under your status that changed between Address Book and Messenger List.
  As the guy in the demo says ( you can watch the demo here) a nice new feature of Yahoo Messenger 9.0 is the Search bar up there in which you can write a contact's name/id and it will find it for you. Now maybe it's just me but wasn't this feature already included in the program ? Oh yes ..wait ..I can see it now as I minimize Opera and look directly at my main messenger window... I wonder how it got in 8.1 if it's brand new in 9.0 ?
  And now for the real NEW AND AWESOME FEATURE : Whenever you write a " :) " in your status message, it now actually appears as ..as ...as ... A YELLOW SMILEY!!!! Indeed ladies and gentlemen a feat never before seen in any messaging program. You have to hand it to the guys at Yahoo , they really know what counts.

As an ending, I'll just recommend we all use Meebo.com for messaging. At least they never pretend to be better than they really are.