• New contact list with feature for resizing the contact icons, as in windows explorer in Windows Vista.
• Enhanced animated smiley's for expressing your emotions.
• New colors for each chat window, to easily differentiate individual windows.
• Combine/docking chat windows into tabs of a single window.
• Drag and drop contact list to the side gadget for initiating frequent and easy conversations.

Salon.com announced that it hit over 1 million uniques in one day for the first time in the company’s 12-year history, a traffic milestone reached when Yahoo! linked from its home page. Techcrunch reports that they received their highest traffic day ever with over 1,000 comments on the post, which almost brought the site down.

Yahoo is still ramping up the number of links it puts on the home page from Buzz, and is being careful about the potential to flat out nuke websites with all the traffic they can send. But it’s clear that a link from Yahoo.com blows away anything Digg or any other competitor can offer. That will keep the Buzz publishers, who must be invited into the service, paying attention.

How does Yahoo Buzz send you huge traffic?
Yahoo! Buzz features the most interesting stories and videos on the Web and the content is ranked based on votes, search-term popularity, and what people are reading and emailing that instant. Yahoo Buzz does not use holding story pages on their site, but rather directly links to the story page boosting traffic to your site to read the full story. You can promote the story further by adding a vote button. Selected Top Buzz content may be featured on the Yahoo! homepage too!

Yahoo! informs that the current beta test is limited to a small set of select publishers to ensure they can evolve the program in a way that is most beneficial for a good user experience. They will be accepting new publishers soon and you can join the mailing list for updates.

Can your web server survive 1 million hits?