There's good news for those looking up to Yahoo! Messenger 9.0, which is currently in beta. On Thursday last week, the company released an update for the same; the messenger now has a host of additional features along with improvements in existing ones.

Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 beta now features games, something that the company had not included in previous updates. Fans would be glad to welcome games like Checkers, Pool, Toki Toki Boom, etc.

The new and improved "Import Contacts" feature aims to keep you loyal to the good old Yahoo! Messenger 9.0. With this, users can add friends from their address books on Gmail, Orkut, Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, etc, and start chatting with them as well.

"Yahoo! Updates" allows users to stay updated with what their friends are up to. Which means, when a user's friend buzzes a favorite news story or changes their Avatar, a "Yahoo! Update" is displayed next to that friend in their contact list (with more details in their contact card).

There's also a new contact list format button with two views available for a user's contact list -- detailed and compact. Along with that, for Vista users, voice in chat rooms has been enabled. The chat room verification process has also been changed; users can now enter the Captcha code right in the chat room window instead of having to go off to another page.

Lastly, Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 offers bigger emoticons (for the ones who suffer from Hyperopia, we're guessing) and a new system wherein if your IM conversation window falls into the background and when a new message comes in to the background window at that time, a small notification will pop up from the lower right corner of your screen with the beginning text of the IM your friend just sent.

You can download the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 beta here.