Ya.Online

» see online.yandex.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Around 2007 the argument in every engineering forum I read was that Jabber was going to win. It was an open protocol and it federated, which meant your chat address could be a mail address instead of a nine-digit number you had to write on a piece of paper. I had used ICQ and then MSN like everyone else in Turkey, so for me the argument stayed an argument. Ya.Online is what it looked like when a company with real users actually tried it.

Yandex put a Jabber server up for unofficial testing in September 2007. A year later the desktop program already carrying the name Я.Онлайн, until then a small thing that told you about new mail and the state of the roads, was rebuilt into a full instant messenger. The lead developer was Mikhail Pishchagin, who was one of the people on the Psi Team, and the client was built straight out of Psi's source. The server side was a modified ejabberd.

What you got was a chat account welded to a mail account. Your Yandex login was your JID. The client raised notifications from Ya.ru and from the Russian social networks. It also showed the weather, and it showed road congestion if you happened to live in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kyiv or Yekaterinburg. There was a typographer and a spellchecker inside the message box, which is a very particular thing to put in a messenger and tells you it was written by people who cared how Russian looked on a screen.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

Two products under one name. The client was a desktop application, with a proprietary Windows-only module doing the mail and social checks, and you could ignore the whole thing and connect with any standard Jabber client you liked. The server carried transports out to Mail.ru and to Facebook, plus conference rooms, so a Yandex account could talk to people who had never heard of Yandex.

Yandex also ran Jabber for your own domain, the same way it ran mail for your own domain, which for a few years made it one of the easiest ways for a small Russian company to have internal chat without running anything. That is the part of Ya.Online that got used by people who could not have told you what XMPP stood for.

~ the day it died ~

The last client release is version 3.2.2, build 816, dated 29 April 2011. Nothing shipped after that. The server kept answering for another five and a half years, which is a long time to leave the lights on in a building nobody is maintaining.

The notice went out in early September 2016 as an email to accounts that still had a Jabber login attached. One Russian blog post about it was headlined with the observation that Yandex was ending Jabber support and nobody had noticed; another simply filed it as Yandex closing its server after everyone else already had, which was accurate. Facebook had shut its XMPP gateway in April 2015 and Google had been walking away from federation since 2013. On 5 October 2016 xmpp.yandex.ru stopped, and Yandex pointed the remaining users at Yandex.Chats and at Ya! Messenger, neither of which spoke the protocol that had been the whole point.

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