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R.I.P.: Yahoo Messenger to shut down July 17
Yahoo, now a division of Oath Inc., is finally shutting down its Messenger service despite an attempt to resurrect the service a few years back.
Launched on March 9, 1998, Yahoo Messenger competed with the likes of MSN Messenger, AIM and ICQ, the last its original target. Along with Yahoo itself, the service rode the same surge of popularity Yahoo had during the first dotcom bubble but then slowly followed its parent company’s decline in later years.
As late as 2008, Statista estimated that Yahoo Messenger had about 248 million users, but as new apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram and LINE emerged, those numbers slowly melted away. The service had only a 5.8 percent market share in the U.S. as of July 2015.
In December 2015, Yahoo launched a new version of Messenger that brought it into a post-dial-up world, which it hoped might bring users back, but by then the writing was on the wall. In 2016, the company announced that it was shutting down the legacy version of the app in favor of the new client. By that point, usage numbers were low, although it was reported at the time that it was still popular among oil traders and others in the wider energy and commodity sectors.
Yahoo Messenger isn’t the only old-school messaging to have been shut down in recent times. AOL, also now an Oath company, shuttered AIM in December. MSN Messenger, later known as Windows Live Messenger, another service from the era, went dark in 2014, and the last man standing from the era, ICQ, continues on somehow.
Yahoo users are being given six months to download their chat history before the service shuts down July 17. The company is reported to be working on a replacement service going by the name of Squirrel, but 9to5Mac reported that it’s still in private beta and it’s unclear if the service will open up to the public before Yahoo Messenger shuts down.
Image: philwolff/Flickr
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