Our friends on the Yahoo! Messenger team dropped us a note alerting us to their newly released Yahoo! Messenger 3 Beta 3 for the Mac. What's the big news with this beta? As you might recall previous betas made Messenger a Universal Binary and added tabbed chats. New in this beta: voice calling.

That's right, you can now do the following with Yahoo! Messenger, just like our Windows running comrades:

• Make free computer to computer calls
• Sign up for a Phone Out account which will allow you to call regular phones with Yahoo! Messenger
• Send free text messages to cell phones (though the receiver might get charged for the text)
• Receive calls from phones on your Mac if you have a Phone In account (these accounts aren't free)

I gave the new features a whirl, so check out our gallery with screenshots of the new features, or head on over to the Yahoo! Messenger blog and watch their screencast.

Apple products often find themselves on the yearly 'Best of' lists composed by the mainstream media and bloggers alike, but they don't often grace the 'Worst of' lists. Sadly, Yahoo! Tech has deemed the Apple TV as one of the 'Top 10 Worst Tech Products' of the year. Apple TV made the list for a few reasons: you can't buy content directly from the box, the lack of updates to the software, and the lack of DVR capabilities are all reasons that the Apple TV is on the naughty list.

I find myself agreeing with Yahoo! on this one. The Apple TV is pretty much just a glorified iTunes extender, and that's why I haven't bought one for myself. That might all change, though, if you are able to rent movies directly from the device in the near future. Let's revisit this one after Steve's Macworld keynote, shall we?

Uh oh, famed purveyor of the SuperSite for Windows and spinster extraordinaire Paul Thurrott is at it again with a third installment of his iPhone review that focuses on the iPhone's performance as an actual phone. Never faltering in his ability to spin a genuinely innovative feature into a mark against a product, Thurrott found a way to blast the iPhone's ability to sync contacts with Yahoo!'s address book for being the only web-based service that made the cut:

First and most obviously, Yahoo! is the only Web-based email/contacts store supported: If you use Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, or any other Web-based email service, you cannot sync between contacts stored there and the iPhone. This is a glaring functional lapse that the early Mac-using iPhone reviewers neatly skipped over

Boy, iPhone users sure are screwed, especially since, outside the Helio Ocean (whose site isn't clear on whether it actually syncs with Yahoo!), I can't think of another mobile phone OS - including Windows Mobile and BlackBerry - that syncs with a web-based email or contact service out of the box (note: sync - not simply 'allow access with some custom UI'). At least, not a significant or even publicized phone from any of the big players like Nokia, Motorola or Samsung. The simple fact is that most mobile phone OS developers haven't made that leap yet, primarily because the web-based services like Gmail and AOL haven't opened themselves up through an API (Application Programming Interface) like Yahoo! has for the iPhone. This is probably because, in the past, it hasn't been worth the effort. Most users who want to sync their contacts with a mobile phone are either power or business users, and they're already using desktop software like Outlook, Entourage or Apple's Address Book that is primed and ready for synching. Apple likely took a chance and opened this partnership to sync with Yahoo! because the iPhone is arguably the first consumer-friendly phone to bring the concept of synching to the general user. For those still wondering why Apple chose Yahoo!, it's likely because they are the leading worldwide webmail provider by a landslide; as of April 2007, Yahoo! Mail's market share doubles Hotmail's and, believe it or not, Gmail trails in an incredibly distant 3rd with 1/13th the traffic of Yahoo!.

While Nik Fletcher at our sister site Download Squad discovered that Meebo works decently on an iPhone, it isn't without some catches. Meebo, for those who have never experienced, is a leading web-based multi-network chat service; in other words - chatting in a web browser is their business, and they've been doing it for a long time. Even though Nik is right, and Meebo might fill in for the lack of any kind of chat in the iPhone, it isn't without some UI quirks that can make the experience less than pleasing. Of course, it is entirely plausible that the Meebo team are already hard at work on getting their product to play nicely with an iPhone, but until then, I figured some tips and tricks were in order for those who are just dying to chat across AIM, Yahoo!, MSN and even ICQ on their iPhones.

1. Save time logging in: You should probably make it easy on yourself and register a Meebo account with a real desktop browser. While you always have the option of manually signing into one or more services each time you visit Meebo, if you want to chat on more than one network, it's going to be a pain in the butt to keep zooming in and out while typing in your login credentials each time. From what I can tell, iSafari (Safari on the iPhone) doesn't properly save your login name and/or password, so it might simply be easier to create a Meebo account and attach all the network logins you want to it so you can simply log into all of them with one master Meebo account.
2. The buddy list works - mostly: I'm no web 2.0 designer, but from what I can tell, Meebo is a pretty complex web-based chat app. Since Meebo is providing some pretty powerful functionality, I'm not surprised that it doesn't work quite right in iSafari, and the quirky buddy list is probably the first thing you'll notice. If you try to tap on any contacts, the entire buddy list gets that dark translucent overlay as if you just tapped on and selected the entire thing. What's worse, you might not even see a new chat window open up, even in landscape mode. Fret not, however: for some reason, Meebo (at least on my iPhone) places new chat windows far, far to the left. If you pinch and zoom out a bit, maybe even scrolling a tad, you should see any and every new chat window you opened by tapping on the buddy list.
3. Handling windows: Once you get over that buddy list hump, the rest of Meebo works fairly well. Tapping in the text field area of a chat window will bring up the iPhone's keyboard, and I find that, given how much space the keyboard takes up, using the iPhone in typical portrait mode (vertically) here gives you a bit more space to see what you're typing and maybe the last word or line of what your buddy said. Simply pressing the Go button in the lower right of the keyboard will actually send your chat message. While windows don't seem to be drag-able, you can tap on their title bars to bring one or the other to the front, allowing you to tap in the text field and get typing. This, of course, is all going to require you to get real comfortable with zooming in and our frequently, because the iPhone will zoom in on the text field area when you want to chat, forcing you to zoom back out to see what your buddy is saying or any other chat windows you have open.

It isn't perfect, but it works. Chat junkies will likely rejoice since they won't have to burn through SMS, and Meebo offers a better experience and more chat networks than that AIM-only experimental app we found last month. Aside from waiting for Apple to get on the ball here, keep your eyes on Meebo, as I would not be surprised if they're working on optimizing their web app for the iPhone.

TUAW reader Dustin Johnston tipped us off that a new OS X framework is getting installed with the OS X 10.4.10 update, namely Yahoo Sync. Located in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks, YahooSync.framework contains an embedded Yahoo!Sync application.

If you want to find it on your computer, choose Go -> Go To Folder in Finder and enter:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/
YahooSync.framework/Versions/A/Resources

Peeking inside the application and framework strings reveals that the synchronization will use a Yahoo! ID stored in Address Book and that you must (obviously) have a Yahoo! account set up in order to synchronize. It's not clear exactly what this application does, but it's likely to allow you to sync your Yahoo! calendar with iCal.

Yahoo! is asking celebrities to compile their holiday tech wish lists. Why? Hello, how would we know what to buy if celebrities didn't tell us? The latest celeb to list their tech wants is Tyra Banks. The top two slots on her list are given over to gear from our favorite fruit company.

The iPod nano (PRODUCT) Red is first on the list, followed up by a 1.83 Ghz MacBook. I don't know about you, but I am happy in my choice of computing platform now that I know Tyra agrees.

When we first came across the beta of Yahoo! Messenger 3 we were impressed. This feels like an OS X app, not some crappy Windows port! Then we pretty much forgot about the whole thing, but Jeff Smykil at Infinite Loop didn't. He wanted to know why Messenger suddenly didn't suck on the Mac, and he wanted to know who was responsible.

It turns out that Tristan O'Tierney, who used to work on the Colloquy project amongst other things, has had a large part in making Messenger 3 beta what it is. Jeff interviews Tristan about all things Mac at Yahoo!, so go check it out.

This is kind of neat. Yahoo! Music is offering a customized MP3 of Jessica Simpson's song 'A Public Affair.' What is customized about it? If your name is on a predetermined list you can buy a version of the song that includes your name in the lyrics for only $1.99.

Scott is currently on the list, but I don't think I'll be shelling out 2 bucks for this novelty, though it will play on your iPod (and you can burn it to a CD).