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Oath is Killing Off Yahoo Messenger on July 17 (betanews.com)
Yahoo Messenger is to be discontinued in just over a month. Yahoo owner Oath has announced that it is killing off its famous Messenger service on July 17. From a report: After this date, chatting will no longer be available, and users have just six months to download their chat histories. At the moment, there is no direct replacement for Yahoo Messenger, but users are being advised that they can request an invite for the beta version of the invite-only group messaging app Yahoo Squirrel. In an FAQ about the announcement, Yahoo addresses why the decision to shutter the service was taken. "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."
As long as ICQ is still running, I am fine.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Only time I ever had it was plugged into Trillian and then later Pidgin as I already had a Yahoo account, from an earlier Geocities account, and... well, why not.
I think I literally never used it past tested that it worked.
Didn't do anything that MSN/AOL/ICQ/etc. couldn't do.
If you have come here it must be because you meet me in yahoo chat.
After this date, chatting will no longer be available, and users have just six months to download their chat histories.
For pete's sake, how long does it take to download a chat history?
"We need to spy on our users and sell their data to make money with a free application today. We'll close down 'messenger' and open 'squirel' which is pretty much the same thing but with a EULA that has language embedded in it somewhere which will let us collect your data."
Verizon will strip Yahoo to the bone and eventually discontinue all services, replacing it with Verizon ones.
I remember it when we used it at the office way back. It was not as intrusive as a phonecall and not as official as an email. And more convinient than walking to somebody to ask in person.
Somehow then it was not abused that much. When the companby closed, I never saw anything like it used anywhere else.
It also showed me a lot about (online) privacy where it took about 5 minutes to be able to phone somebody at their place of work. And that was before google existed.
And having a (fake) female name with some random image showed me how creepy some guys are.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Why does Yahoo have this data and how far back does it go ???
I feel no love for Yahoo messenger, but if you are planning a replacement, discontinuing the current one is a really bad business decision. All your users will leave, when they could have been transferred easily by merely updating their clients.
This is how Microsoft went from 14% of the smart-phone market to 1% of the smart-phone market: by bringing out an incompatible version (in their case it was especially pathetic because the underlying OS was still based on WinCE, they just chose not to expose that to developers).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This is just the cleanup work after eliminating the original yahoo protocol for some crappy webapp thing they did that broke everyone's contact lists a year or so before the Verizon acquisition. The result of that being that anyone worthwhile left, and the few that remained weren't using real clients anyways.
is that they are going to refactor the new messenger app to allow harvesting and reselling more meta data
Old needs: instant messaging
New needs: Tracking, profiling, advertising...
IF you have 'many loyal users' perhaps it already 'fits their needs'. But it probably lacks a nice spying interface on the backend being so old....
I miss the days when electronic communications protocols lasted over a century.
STOP - Telegram era over, Western Union says 2/2/2006 2:30:26 PM ET
"DENVER - For more than 150 years, messages of joy, sorrow and success came in signature yellow envelopes hand-delivered by a courier. Now the Western Union telegram is officially a thing of the past. "
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Are you talking shit about Yahoo Squirrel ????
Specifically I can't log in without checking my "backup email address", which is a string of nonsense I entered a half decade ago to make a nagging message go away.
I wondered if the same happened to someone else. If you didn't know, you're warned.
If you have an old yahoo account, check it and get all your old mail and data out. But I wish I did think about that last time yahoo was merged/sold out.
ICQ is not still running -- at least, not the way it used to. When I log in to my account (which I had been using continuously since 1996 or 1997), I find that everything has been locked down. Trying to send messages to anyone results in the reply, "Your account has been compromised. Please proceed to the following link to unblock your account", followed by the URL of a form hosted on the ICQ website. The form offers to unlock the account upon receipt of a mobile phone number. Googling shows that this problem isn't unique to me; a lot of other people have reported the same problem. I've tried contacting ICQ support to insist that my account is not compromised, but the support reps who respond say the only way they will unlock the account is via SMS. I never give my phone number to IM/social networking companies and am not about to start now. The "Your account has been compromised" message is either a ruse to get everyone to hand over their personal details to ICQ, or else ICQ has suffered a massive, undisclosed data breach. Either way, I'm not using the service any more.
One of the biggest, yet least appreciated drivers of success in the instant messaging market is having huge masses of free users. That's what provided the foundation for MSN Messenger and Skype to succeed. (The same marketing model is a large driver of Facebook's success) Knowing that many of your friends were already using X is a good reason for you to start using it too. Another driver, at least in my opinion, is the ability to connect to your network using third party applications. That lets you get more users with no cost to you beyond the bandwidth and server load charges. That's why applications like Trillian and Pidgin were so popular.
But Yahoo Messenger shot itself in the foot when it changed the API several times before closing it altogether. Sure, it unloaded all those leeches who were using third party apps and hence weren't seeing the ads the official client carried. But at the same time it drastically cut into the relevance for the users of the official client. Why use Yahoo if many of your friends are migrating to $otherapp?
In my opinion, Yahoo has made a similar critical error in just dumping its current user base. What I think they should be doing is maintaining that user base and offering a free and extremely painless migration to Squirrel once it is ready for prime time. Making Squirrel invite only is doubling down on a bad bet. Any invite only community is going to be small. Who is going to want to go through the hassle of asking around for an invite when most of their friends and colleagues are already using Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype, KIk, Snapchat et all? Through in any lingering feelings of abandonment and resentment from the former Yahoo Messenger user base and you have a recipe for market failure.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Chat rooms, mic, camera, the ability for two people to chat.
The lack of fast broadband did not matter and users all over the world could enjoy the service.
The service worked when the rest of the internet was just understanding how to consider software for text, cam, VOIP.
To all the people who designed and then worked on the projects
Thank you all for the amazing work and design that no other brand had ready.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"