Some things are just more fun with a group of friends. And using Yahoo! Messenger is one of them. While not new to Yahoo! Messenger, I thought I’d take a moment to highlight the group features that are available in Yahoo! Messenger 9.0.
If you’re like me, you have a variety of people in your contact list – some are from work, some are friends, others are family. As a result, I have several groups in my contact list. While the groups make it easier for me to find someone in my list, it also enables me to use some handy features for quickly communicating with each group.
When you right-click on a group name in your contact list, you’ll see a few options. The first is “Broadcast an IM”. When you select this feature, a new IM window pops up and provides a place for you to type your message. When you click Send, that IM gets sent to everyone in that group. No need to open multiple windows to contact each one of them, we’ll do it for you. When someone responds, it will come back to you as a new IM conversation between you and that friend.
The menu also offers “Start a conference”. This is one of the more fun features in Yahoo! Messenger and it enables you to start a private chat room with your friends. Your friends will receive an invite, asking them to join you in a conference. Conferences are a great way to plan group events, discuss current events, or just kill time.
Even if you haven’t created groups in your contact list, you can still easily start a conference with a group of friends without having to IM each one separately. Just select multiple contacts from your list using the keyboard/mouse combo SHIFT + click or CTRL + click. Then right-click on one of the selected contacts, go to “More Actions” and select “Start a conference”.
And if there are certain groups you’d prefer not to be available to (like your work friends when you’re signed on over the weekend at home), you can also change stealth settings by group. Just right click on a group name in your list and select “Stealth Settings”. Then choose “Appear permanently offline to selected contacts”.
We use the word permanent in that description because your stealth setting for that group will persist if you sign out and sign back in again. To go back to appearing online to that group of contacts, right-click again and choose Stealth Settings > “Appear online to selected contacts”.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager