Yahoo Avatars

» see avatars.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

msn was the dominant chat service in turkey through 2002 to 2010 and yahoo messenger had a smaller presence on the side, mostly for people with american contacts or yahoo mail addresses they still cared about. i had yahoo messenger installed at some point in the mid-2000s but it was never my primary client. the avatar feature lived inside a product i barely used.

yahoo avatars launched in may 2004 with yahoo messenger 6. the pitch was a built-in character creator inside the messenger client. you opened a panel, picked face shape and hair and clothes off preset menus, and the result became your messenger display icon. later it spread to yahoo answers profiles and to a small standalone editor at avatars.yahoo.com. the asset library covered seasonal updates, branded tie-ins with movies, and a few free packs for events.

in those days. the design was on the cartoon end of the early-2000s avatar scale. closer to a habbo character or a yahoo property mascot than a realistic portrait. that visual language aged out fast once facebook profile pictures became the norm and people stopped treating their messenger handle as their main online identity. yahoo avatars kept shipping new asset packs through the late 2000s but the actual usage curve was already pointing the other way.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the editor was a simple flash-era panel inside messenger 6. you picked a face, a haircut, a top, a bottom, a background. the result rendered as a static png that showed up next to your name in chat windows and on your profile page. the panel had a small set of free options and a larger paid catalog for premium accents. most users never bought anything, stuck with whatever preset they assembled in the first session, then forgot about it.

the integration with yahoo answers in 2005 was the second life. for the few years where yahoo answers was the busiest qa product on the web, your avatar was the small portrait next to your question or response. for plenty of users that was the only place their yahoo avatar ever got seen by strangers. really though, the answers integration extended the useful life of the asset by a few years beyond what messenger usage alone would have justified.

~ the spring cleaning ~

marissa mayer joined yahoo as ceo in july 2012 and started a product-cull strategy that copied google's playbook from the late aughts. on march 1 of 2013 yahoo announced a batch of six products closing on april 1. yahoo avatars was on the list alongside the yahoo blackberry app, yahoo clues beta, yahoo app search, yahoo sports iq, and the yahoo message boards site.

the announcement told users to download their avatar files if they wanted to keep a copy. in those days. one month was the migration window. on april 1 the editor stopped working and the profile pictures cached on messenger and answers stayed in place for a while before fading out as those products were themselves redesigned and rebuilt.

~ what survived ~

yahoo avatars sat in the small pre-facebook category of identity-presentation products that did not survive the switch to real-name profile photos. the closest peers were msn messenger display pictures, aim icons, and the personas you built in habbo or club penguin. the difference is that the messenger and chat-icon side was a side-feature inside a bigger product, the habbo-club-penguin side was the actual product. yahoo avatars existed somewhere between the two.

the japan version of the service had closed in december 2012, ahead of the main global shutdown by a few months. the asset library never got reissued anywhere. yahoo messenger itself went through the dec 2015 rewrite and the july 2018 final shutdown. the avatar layer was already gone before either of those.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »