Sad to see, but I've been waiting for this moment for years.<p>My first "real" job was as an intern on the Yahoo! Messenger team where I worked on both the Windows and Mac versions more than ten years ago.<p>Back in those days while I had been sad that XMPP never took off, I had accepted that if you wanted to make cool IM client interfaces and get them in front of a lot of real people, you had to work on one of the big popular proprietary ones.<p>It was an amazing experience working on it. When I went back to school after the internship, I observed people at school who I never met using features I wrote during my internship! How cool is that? Given that experience, I've always had a soft spot for Yahoo! and dreaded the growing inevitability of today's announcement.<p>In the years since, my passion for IM has been a largely sad one. I promoted Google Talk heavily when it came out due to it being based on XMPP, only to see Google bait and switch us. Then I resigned myself back to proprietary IM hell for a while as getting people to use XMPP seemed increasingly ridiculous as its user experience lagged further and further behind Hangouts, iMessage, etc, etc...<p>Then eventually the Riot IM client came out and I got excited about IM again. One of many clients built atop the new Matrix protocol which styles itself as a successor to XMPP, Riot was the first IM client I'd ever used that felt like it rivaled the big players in IM in terms of user experience.<p>While my career has moved on from coding IM clients, I am glad to say I've helped the Matrix/Riot folks a small amount with coding and localization. And most importantly I cheer them on publicly and privately every chance I get.
I haven't thought about Yahoo Messenger in years, maybe a decade+. I'm looking forward to see what my chat logs from back then contain; I think it might have been my primary communication method in high school.
(That website won't let me read it unless I “consent” to tracking.)<p>Which communication protocol is this using? XMPP? Matrix? ActivityPub? A well-specified encryption scheme on top of email?<p>I'm guessing this is yet another communication app that won't communicate with anything but itself, because its features are so very unique and innovative.
Yahoo Messenger used to be <i>at least</i> as popular as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger are right now in certain countries (at least in terms of percentage of internet users in their respective periods).<p>Yahoo Messenger losing its relevance was an even bigger failure than Google killing Gtalk (at least Google sort of continued it through the resource and data hog Hangouts).
Somewhat offtopic, but related - Any else remember Yahoo Messenger (new beta) being an evangelist for WPF in the mainstream? Which didn't pan out iirc, infact did any mainstream commercials apps, thus excluding internal LOBs launch, even make it on to WPF? ~2009
This is off-topic but...reading the article I wondered what happened to all that personal information we put into services like Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail?<p>At least in the US there is no guardrail that would prevent mining the data for any purpose its current overlords deem useful. That includes reselling it to others.