Remember dial-up modems and Yahoo Messenger?

The first is a long gone memory, but the original Yahoo Messenger, launched in 1998, has somehow managed to keep going, that is until now with Yahoo, Inc. announcing that the original service, as opposed to its new version (which goes by the same name) will be closed August 5th.

Despite virtually no one using it in 2016, according to Venturebeat some people actually still do use it, including bizarrely oil traders, and separately marine fuels industry news site Ship and Bunker claims that it is still used by people in the bunker industry, as well as others in the wider energy and commodity industries.

Yahoo explained the decision in a blog post, saying that they wanted users to move on to the new version of Messenger they launched in December 2015:

In December of 2015, we announced a brand new Yahoo Messenger for mobile, the Web and in Yahoo Mail on the desktop, built on a new modern platform. This complete revamp brings users an incredibly fast, beautiful and smart way to send – and unsend – messages, photos and animated GIFs in 1:1 and group conversations. While today we provide basic interoperation between the legacy product and the new Messenger, we encourage all of our users to complete their transition to the new Yahoo Messenger as we will no longer support the legacy platform as of August 5, 2016. We intend to continue our focused efforts on the new Messenger, with a goal of delivering the best experience to our users

Legacy

In its day, Yahoo Messenger competed with the likes of MSN Messenger, AIM, and ICQ, the latter being its original target.

During its time it introduced IMVironments (customizing the look of Instant Message windows), address-book integration and Custom Status Messages; it all looked feeble by the standards of 2016, but for a time Yahoo Messenger took the good fight up to its competitors.

The close not only affects users of the legacy version of Yahoo Messenger but also all third party apps that sent messages built on top of Yahoo’s API.

photo credit: Tallinn / 塔林 | :P via photopin (license)