How to Add and Remove Plug-Ins from Yahoo Messenger

Instant messaging has become an integral part of our life. Nowadays, its hard to imagine life without instant messaging. Your messenger Id has become an important part of your contact details. In fact, now even big businesses have joined this bandwagon. They are providing instant messaging facilities to their employees so that they can remain connected over the company intranet.

As messengers are becoming more popular, they are providing more advanced features to their users. They started with providing voice chat facility, added video chat to that. And now you can even call landline phones from most of your messengers. Some messengers even support text messaging, so that someone can send you instant messages from their cell phone, and you can reply them back.

The latest version of Yahoo Messenger (version 8.0 with voice) has gone a step further. It has provided facility to add additional Plug-Ins to your Yahoo messenger. To start with, it has provided various Plug-Ins that can be added, such as Yahoo Weather, Yahoo 360, Yahoo News, Yahoo Answers, and a lot more. Apart from that, it has also opened a whole new bunch of opportunities. Now even third party companies can create Plug-Ins for Yahoo Messenger to add specialized services to Yahoo Messenger. One such example is Pongo Plug-In for Yahoo Messenger. Once you add this Plug-In, you can transfer large files (upto 1 GB in size) from your Yahoo Messenger. Adding and managing these Plug-Ins is a really simple process, as detailed below.

Adding New Plug-Ins

Adding new Plug-Ins to Yahoo messenger is really a very simple process. To start with, first of all you need to ensure that you have latest version of Yahoo messenger (8.0 or above). In case you have some older version, then please download the latest version from Yahoo's website (www.Yahoo.com). Once you have ensured that you have the latest version, login to your Yahoo messenger. In the main window of Yahoo messenger (the one that shows list of all your contacts), there is a button titled "Add Plug-ins" towards the bottom. This button helps in adding/managing Plug-Ins. Click on this button to bring the Plug-Ins Manger window. This window has two tabs: Featured Plug-Ins, and My Plug-Ins. The Featured Plug-Ins tab shows a list of popular messenger Plug-Ins. And My Plug-Ins tab shows list of all the Plug-Ins that are already installed on your Yahoo messenger. To add a new Plug-In, click on the name of the Plug-In in the "Featured Plug-Ins" tab. On the right side of the Plug-In name, there is an option "Try it Now". Click on this option. This will install the selected Plug-In to your Yahoo messenger. So, it is basically a very simple process to add new Plug-Ins to the Yahoo messenger.

Removing Plug-Ins

Having fun with Plug-Ins? What if you do not need these Plug-Ins any more? How to get rid of them?
Removing Plug-Ins from Yahoo messenger is also a very neat and simple process. To start with, again click on "Add Plug-Ins" button in the main Yahoo messenger window. This will bring the plug-ins manager window. In this window, select the tab "My Plug-Ins". This tab lists all the Plug-Ins that are installed with your Yahoo messenger. With each Plug-In, there are two options. There is an option titled "Stop". Clicking on this option will stop the selected Plug-In. Plug-In can be started again by clicking on option "Start". Next there is a trash can icon with each Plug-In. To uninstall a Plug-In, simply click the trash can icon corresponding to the Plug-In to be removed. This will remove the selected Plug-In.

The Plug-In feature of Yahoo messenger is a really cool feature, and it has some practical use too. I am in particular a big fan of Pongo plug-in. You too can find some as per your liking. To install and uninstall them is really a hassle free task, as detailed above.