14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo has been adding social features to its instant messenger client for a while and has recently added the possibility to share your activity on other sites with your IM friends automatically. But some of the capabilities of the feature still aren't known by many users so Yahoo decided show them how to share their Twitter updates within the client.
“Did you know that you can easily share your Twitter updates with your Yahoo! Messenger friends, even if they aren’t following you? The updates feature in Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 allows you to share updates from a variety of outside sites and services with your Yahoo! Friends,” Sarah Bacon, product manager, wrote. “When you elect to share your latest Twitter tweets with anyone, friends that have you on their Messenger contact list will be able to see them.”
Enabling the functionality is simple enough. Users have to first link their Twitter account to their Yahoo Profile by visiting the Share More page. Once there all they have to do is fill out their account name in the Twitter section and Yahoo takes care of the rest. By default anyone on Yahoo and all of their contacts will now be able to see the Twitter updates and they will show up as the users' status messages with a detailed view available when viewing the contact details. However if they don't want the whole world to see the updates they can choose to only share them with their Yahoo Messenger contacts or the users they explicitly connect with in Yahoo Profiles or, if they wish, with nobody at all from the Manage My Updates page.
The feature is only available for Yahoo Messenger 9, with older versions not supported. In fact, several older versions of the IM will be declared deprecated soon as the company announced it would be dropping support for all versions from 6.0 through 7.5. Initially the old versions were to be dropped this month but Yahoo has decided to give users a little more time, extending the deadline to early September.