What Ever Happened to Yahoo! Messenger?

[Amir Shoam]

Yahoo! Messenger was never the most popular, but for many years it was close enough to keep trying, introducing many messaging features years before they became the norm.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/article/2484-yahoo-messenger/

 

[psycros]

Ah, the days of intuitive and sensible UIs, function-first programming and minimal monetization. How I miss them.

 

[mrtraver]

I remember chatting with a friend on Yahoo! Messenger, and having a totally separate convo with that same friend on AIM. I preferred Yahoo, and pretty much used it until text messages and Facebook Messenger supplanted it.

 

[Alfatawi Mendel]

Never mind Yahoo. What happened to the Nvidia 1630 review? Should be a good laugh...

 

[madboyv1]

Man I forgot about those Audibles, that brings back memories!

 

[EdmondRC]

Technology was fun and exciting, especially in the late 80s and through the 90s and I would say it mostly improved our lives back then right up until social media came along, then the smartphone and it was all downhill from there.

 

[lazer]

I remember when Yahoo was the number one search engine, all the others at that time are gone. Why?
They did not keep up with the current trends.
Once some one is number ONE, they think it will be forever. What they are doing is great so can not improve or change. Wrong! gotta change with the times and the people.
Good bye Yahoo search, Yahoo messenger, and the others who did not keep up with the changing times

 

[AmigaInside]

It was excellent, and those Audibles extremely cool. Ruined by bad management, once more.

 

[Dustyn]

Don't forget about Trillian!

 

[WhoCaresAnymore]

I remember all of them (I'm that old). The thing these companies just don't understand. KISS. They bloat everything and nobody wants to use them anymore.

 

[purplepotatocake]

The article is OK but misses a lot of major events that led users away from Yahoo Messenger. A big example is Yahoo's neglect of user ran public group chats. After a wave of media scares, Yahoo removed the ability to publicly list user ran group chats and neglected the group chat's feature set while other companies surpassed it. This led a lot of users to seek alternatives in the form of Skype, Mumble, Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Paltalk, Meebo, Windows Live Messenger and even AIM.

Another big factor was AIM's presence as a default app on Mac OS.

There's also AIM's proprietary communication protocol called OSCAR that was thoroughly reverse engineered which made AIM and its proprietary features more widely available on third party clients, leading to greater popularity than Yahoo among people who primarily utilized third party messaging clients.

 

[ricardoreporter1]

There's also AIM's proprietary communication protocol called OSCAR that was thoroughly reverse engineered which made AIM and its proprietary features more widely available on third party clients, leading to greater popularity than Yahoo among people who primarily utilized third party messaging clients.