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Yahoo has launched its new Yahoo Messenger 9.0, instant messaging application for Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Yahoo has introduced a new Pingbox widget to Yahoo Messenger that makes it more social. The Pingbox application allows social networking users, Web site administrators, and bloggers to chat in real time once its embedded into a site.

Visitors to a site with Pingbox embedded can communicate anonymously or they can identify themselves. The end user can also be anonymous.

Other new features to Yahoo Messenger include three new skins (Silver, Ruby Red, Mystic Black) bringing the total number of skins to 12.

Yahoo has also introduced more spam control to its messenger application. An updated offline message window displays which messages are likely spam and allows users to report these messages from the offline message window.

Yahoo Messenger now updates a user's status with their recent activity on Yahoo Buzz, Avatars, 360, or MyBlogLog.

Yahoo has also gotten rid of the larger emoticons on messenger and reintroduced the smaller original design. For users not familiar with Yahoo Messenger 9.0 while it was in beta, there are also six new emoticons created by Yahoo users in a contest over the summer. They include a thumps up, thumbs down, "It wasn't me!," hurry up, rock on! and "Don't want to see!!"