Yahoo Messenger, after about two decades, is being killed off by Oath, Yahoo's parent company. It’s quite possible that many of the readers might not remember, but back in day, Yahoo Messenger was a big deal.
What killed the platform was its apparent obsession to be a desktop-friendly platform, while most of the world was moving to the smartphone era.
The messaging app will be shut on 17 July. If anyone who still somehow uses the app, they will be shifted to the new messaging app Squirrel that is being introduced by the company.
They will also be given six month's time to save all their chat history before the Verizon owned company pulls the plug on Yahoo Messenger.
Yahoo Messenger was introduced in 1998 and was known as the Yahoo pager at that time.
The messaging platform became all the rage among the youth. It was quite popular in India as well and was seen as better than Google's Google Talk at that time.
As you can imagine, social media has been on nostalgia mode, ever since the news broke this week.
Some are even being made to feel old, as they see the app bringing down its curtains after two decades.
With the emergence of apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk (Now Hangouts) have been fighting for survival.
So much so that the term ‘Messenger’ which was earlier synonymous with Yahoo Messenger is now used for Facebook’s Messenger platform.
For many kids in the 90s, Yahoo Messenger was the gateway to virtual chatting, which has later kicked on to become a booming phenomenon. It used to have all sorts of chat rooms that one could join, without paying anything.
That’s not all, people had to bear with snail-paced dial-up connections for internet to start rolling. This is also the time when cybercafes became a hotspot for teenagers looking for leisure time away from the eyes of their folks.
Although Yahoo did try modern tactics to make the Messenger work in today's time, by launching it on Google's Android and iOS, it failed to regain its charm.
So long Yahoo Messenger.
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