New generation Yahoo Messenger now on mobile

To keep up with the times, Yahoo Inc. has redesigned its Yahoo Messenger to suit the needs of those on the mobile platform.

“The messaging space has grown dramatically, yet people ultimately want a fast and easy way to communicate with each other,” said Jeff Bonforte, senior vice president of communication products and engineering at Yahoo.

Unlike the old Messenger that was best accessed through a desktop, the new app will focus more on its mobile function. Old features such as one-on-one and group chats, emoticons and photo sharing are still there, but tweaked to adapt to feature-rich smartphones.

The interface, Yahoo product manager Austin Shoemaker said, is cleaner and lighter, making it more appealing to the users’ eyes.

“You can see how fast the app is. The new Yahoo Messenger loads very quickly and you can backtrack previous messages easily,” Shoemaker explained.

Yahoo Messenger’s photo sharing, which is integrated with Flickr’s photo sharing platform, allows user to send hundreds of photos through a simple upload tool.

Shared photos can be easily viewed on a photo drawer by scrolling horizontally without interrupting the ongoing chat.

Animated GIFs, powered by microblogging platform Tumblr, can be also searched and shared on the app.

Users can also “like” a message, photo, or GIF sent by another user by simply tapping on it.

The Yahoo Messenger app also boasts of its unique feature of “unsending” messages from a conversation thread and, for users who don’t have continuous access to the Internet, automatically sending messages once the Wi-Fi or data connection is turned back on. Shoemaker said this would also be convenient for users who are on-board a plane.

In addition, Web or Yahoo Mail users can use the Account Key feature, which uses push notifications for fast and secure access to their Yahoo Messenger app account without the fuss of logging on again.

“The next generation Yahoo Messenger will incrementally replace the old messenger. Our team integrated a new foundation, an entirely new app for messaging,” Shoemaker said.

Shoemaker said Yahoo promises to bring new features every week and the company will soon be working on video and voice messaging.

“Yahoo Messenger has been there for a long time. Being connected with Yahoo Mail-which has over a million of subscribers-there is always a reason to choose Yahoo,” he said.