I discovered this little piece of information about a week ago. Truth be told, I didn’t even realize the beta had already been released about two months ago. I guess I was thinking YM9′s still pretty new to be needing an update.

Upon installing it over the weekend on a new computer I assembled, the initial log in screen didn’t seem to have much difference over the previous version. In fact, the only thing I noticed was out of place was the addition of a drop-down to choose your preferred language.

And since it’s not really going to translate the language of your chat messages, I found it quite useless, especially since I’ve been using YM for quite some time and I can even configure its settings with my eyes closed – not that the average user has to change any of the default settings.

After choosing my preferred skin (mystic black, in case you’re interested), a few other kinks came up. As I don’t really group my YM contacts and show only who’s online, the sudden appearance of the address book and two entries that I never realized I typed in before was a bit of a nuisance.

After deleting those entries and hiding other “useless” stuff like the plugins or the search bar, I found it wasn’t possible (at least not with the built-in “configurator”) to hide the Y! Updates tab. As a minimalist, this came as another irritating feature.

So I checked out what was in Y! Updates and, lo and behold, I thought I was looking at a Facebook news feed! Now, I know that microblogging was virtually started by YM with the ability to put up a status. And seeing it incorporate a feature that’s already being used by a huge percentage of the most popular social networks was quite interesting. Not my cup of tea, but still.

This got me to searching what other advantages YM10 had over YM9. With none of the others initially noticeable, I turned to good ol’ Google for knowledge. As it turns out, there’s also a new way to arrange your contacts based on availability and recent activity.

But overall, aside from the heavily-marketed “support for high quality video calls,” I don’t see any immediate reason why I should waste a few minutes updating the computers I’m handling from YM9. If it was a new PC, then maybe. But at the end of the day, there wasn’t a significant feature that grabbed my attention the way YM9 beta’s new additions (YouTube player, ’nuff said) enticed me to abandon YM8.

My verdict: get it if you can spare it. Otherwise, you aren’t missing out on anything. Or at least not with version 10.0.0.1102.