Introduction
With Internet becoming a household must, communications have taken a new dimension these days. Internet chat is fast becoming one of the fastest and most convenient way to communicate. Given this popularity of chat, a lot of chat clients have flooded the market. Yahoo jumped the messenger bandwagon to convert its mail market share into the messenger market as well.

Installation
Installation of Yahoo Messenger is pretty straight-forward. Just download the software from the Yahoo site and double click it and that's it.

One irritating factor about Yahoo Messenger installation is that a whole suit of components like Yahoo Pager and God knows what not gets installed with it.

Basic Features
Yahoo Messenger provides for the basic features of chat pretty efficiently.

1) Yahoo Messenger provides easy means to add and manage contacts. Also allows users to add other contacts even if they are offline.
2) It provides easy means to group and sort contacts into various sections.
3) It provides for one on one chat as well as multi-contact conferences.
4) Along with typed chat it also provides for voice chat.
5) Also provides for sending files and attachments across to contacts.

All these basic features have been implemented.

Advanced Features
Apart from this Yahoo Messenger has been integrated with Yahoo Mail to provide added features.

1) Yahoo Messenger also allows for instant mailing to contacts, using Yahoo Mail. Messenger allows acts as a notification server for mails recieved in your Yahoo account.
2) Allows users to block troublesome users from seeing them or sending messages to them.
3) IMvironments is a good innovation to chat. It takes chat to the next level of interaction although it is currently just a cosmetic feature.
4) It allows users to set their own custom status. Again this feature is a just a cosmetic feature, but is sometimes pretty handy.
5) Of course we have the usual set of smileys and facilities to configure the look of the chat client.

Drawbacks
Despite all these good features, Yahoo Messenger does suffer from a few drawbacks.
1) The biggest drawback of the Yahoo Messenger is the network bandwidth that it eats into. The moment I install Yahoo Messenger, my network bandwidth goes down drastically. All the components of the suite seem to drastically eat into the bandwidth.
2) On the UI front Yahoo Messenger is a distant second to MSN Messenger.
3) Advanced features like Video Conferencing or Phone calls need to be added.


Summary
Looking at the above set of feature list and drawbacks, it is pretty clear that the features outweigh its drawbacks.

But given that MSN provides for better features and also has better UI and eats into less of your bandwidth, I feel Yahoo Messenger is only second to MSN Messenger. I prefer MSN Messenger over Yahoo Messenger due to this.

Recommended: Yes