Tag: Yahoo Messenger

Yahoo Messenger Is Being Killed Off On July 17th 2018

Anyone who grew up in the early 2000’s knows two things about the internet – the dial-up tone and Yahoo Messenger. Long before Snapcha and Facebook Messenger, there was the ultimate social media platform, Yahoo Messenger. The instant messaging app, which is now run by Verizon-owned Oath will shut down on July 17th.

Oath will be redirecting its users (if any) to its new group messaging app, Squirrel. The company is encouraging users to sign up for Squirrel which the company has been beta testing since May. Squirrel is currently invite-only, but the app should be open to the public by the time Yahoo Messenger shuts down.

We know we have many loyal fans who have used Yahoo Messenger since its beginning as one of the first chat apps of its kind. As the communications landscape continues to change over, we’re focusing on building and introducing new, exciting communications tools that better fit consumer needs.

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The death of the Messenger has been imminent. In 2016, Yahoo was acquired by Verizon for US$ 4.6 billion. Verizon renamed the business as Oath and started selling off parts of Yahoo. The company recently sold Flickr, a popular photo-sharing app to SmugMug. As was with the case of Flickr, Yahoo Messenger could not cope with the rise of social media apps like Facebook and then instant messaging services like WhatsApp.

Yahoo Messenger made its debut in 1998 as Yahoo Pager. For many years, it became the sole IM service that teens and adults used across the globe. From anonymous chat rooms to set a status message, Yahoo Messenger did it first. While it is fair to romanticise a fallen legend, the reality is that the Messenger faded away. While Squirrel is what Oath is working on, it isn’t a like-for-like replacement of Yahoo Messenger.

There currently isn’t a replacement product available for Yahoo Messenger. We’re constantly experimenting with new services and apps, one of which is an invite-only group messaging app called Yahoo Squirrel (currently in beta).

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Its users will have up to 6 months after July 17th to download their Messenger chat history. Their Yahoo email ID will continue to work and users will be able to access Yahoo Mail or log in to any other services using their email ID. The writing was on the wall for the end of the Yahoo! era and the killing off of Yahoo Messenger is just another brick in that wall.

June 9, 2018
AIM To Shut Down On December 15th

One of the pioneers of the instant messaging apps, AOL Instant Messenger is shutting down on December 15th 2017. The news comes 20 years after the launch of AIM, which became a wildly popular feature of AOL, the largest internet provider at the time.

Verizon acquired AOL in 2015 and merged it into a unit called Oath in 2017. VP of Oath said:

AIM tapped into new digital technologies and ignited a cultural shift, but the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed. As a result we’ve made the decision that we will be discontinuing AIM effective 15 December, 2017. We are more excited than ever to continue building the next generation of iconic brands and life-changing products for users around the world.

AOL cut off access to AIM from third-party chat clients in March 2017, hinting that a shutdown is inevitable.With the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp and Snapchat taking over social media, it’s hard to imagine that many people are still using AIM. Keeping that in mind, it seems unlikely that this shutdown will affect anyone or anything.

This is not the first time that a classic IM app has shut down. MSN Messenger shut down in 2014, and Yahoo Messenger shut down in 2016 however, Yahoo launched a new messaging service under the same name.

One of the most widely used instant messenger back in ’90s and early 2000’s, AIM bridged the gap between friends who had moved to different places. With time, AIM fell down the pecking order as the era of smartphones reached the fore. Text messaging has taken over precedence over desktop instant messaging apps, and increasingly, social media apps like Snapchat and Instagram, are taking over text messaging in certain ways. Nowadays, everyone is connected to their long lost friends and relatives on Facebook which provides instant messaging solutions on the go.

October 7, 2017
Yahoo Relaunches Messenger, Attempts to Take on Facebook

Yahoo announced today that it’s launching an entirely new Messenger platform on mobile, web and within Yahoo mail that is faster, smarter and better than ever before. You may remember that Yahoo Messenger did exist many years ago, much before WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger took over the world. Yahoo is back and wants to level the playing field a little – and it has the app to do so.

Yahoo Messenger introduces a whole bunch of new and unique features. Like on WhatsApp, you can name each conversation group like maybe one for “drinking buddies” and another for “office peeps”. Anyone in the group can add another chat buddy.

But messaging isn’t the only thing the app boasts off. One of the highlights of Yahoo Messenger is photo sharing that unlike any other messaging service today. Since Yahoo owns Flickr, it was able to harness the latter’s powerful photo management platform.

“In most messaging apps, you have to decide between quality or speed,” explained Austin Shoemaker, senior director of product management for Yahoo Messenger to Engadget. iMessage, for example, allows you to send high-res photos, but it takes awhile to do so. WhatsApp, on the other hand, downgrades images in order to send them quicker. “But we thought: Why not have both?”

“The new Yahoo Messenger achieves both speed and quality by streaming photos into the conversation,” explains Shoemaker. “A small preview of the photo is uploaded and appears in the conversation. The original photo is then uploaded in the background.”

Moreover, if you send multiple photos at once, they’ll be displayed horizontally underneath the message rather than vertically as is the case with mostly all messaging services out there. On the new Yahoo Messenger, you can simply swipe through the photos from left to right. This way, Shoemaker says, you can view the photos while remaining in the context of the conversation.

But that’s not all Yahoo Messenger does. You can also send GIFs, similar to Facebook’s Messenger service. Yahoo Messenger also pulls an Instagram where you can double tap to ‘like’ or ‘heart’ a message. Finally, and this might just win heart here, you can also ‘unsound’ a message. if you sent a photo that you regret, you can easily delete it from the thread later on and it’ll be wiped from the conversation history. And this rule stands not just for photos but for messages and GIFs as well.

The Yahoo Messenger app is available on Android and iOS starting today. Though it will take some time for the app to be made available everywhere.

December 3, 2015