Yahoo Clubs

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

~ the obituary ~

Yahoo launched Clubs in 1998, out of the same part of the company that was building Messenger. The offer was that anybody could name a subject and be given a place for it, at once and for nothing. What you got was a message board with a chat room attached, a photo album and a roster of everyone who had joined, all sitting under clubs.yahoo.com with your club's name on the end.

That was a large thing to hand out in 1998. Running a forum otherwise meant renting hosting and installing software, which most people could not do and would not have wanted to. A Yahoo club took a few minutes and no money, and for two or three years it was the default answer for a group of people who needed somewhere to talk that was not an email chain.

Then Yahoo bought its way into the same business twice over. In August 2000 it completed the purchase of eGroups, the mailing-list company that had started as FindMail, for around $432 million in stock. On 30 January 2001 it launched Yahoo Groups, built from the eGroups technology and populated with the communities from both eGroups and Clubs. The clubs were converted into groups over the following year. Nothing was announced loudly, because from Yahoo's side this was a consolidation of two products it already owned.

~ the case file ~

~ two systems, one survivor ~

Clubs and eGroups solved the same problem from opposite ends. A club lived on the web: you went to a page, you read the board, and the conversation stayed at that address whether or not you were logged in. An eGroups list lived in your inbox, and the web archive was a copy of what had already been mailed out.

Yahoo kept the inbox one, and that decision set what Yahoo Groups would be for the next twenty years. Groups grew enormous on the mailing-list model, over a hundred million members by 2010, and it was still recognizably an email product on the day it was deleted in December 2020. The web-first community tool Yahoo already had was the thing that got absorbed.

~ the yahoo we had ~

In Turkey around 2000 the parts of Yahoo that were actually in daily use were mail and the chat rooms. Clubs were there for anyone who looked, and mostly people did not look, because the discussion you wanted in Turkish was already happening on a local forum or in a chat room you could reach faster. After 2002 the whole question moved to MSN anyway, and it stayed there for the rest of the decade.

~ the address ~

clubs.yahoo.com kept serving real pages long after Groups existed. The Internet Archive has it answering normally as late as March 2002, more than a year after the merged product launched, and by late May of that year every request was coming back as a redirect. That gap is the whole conversion: a year of two overlapping community systems inside one company, ending with the older one pointed at the newer.

Yahoo Groups then ran until 2020 and had its own long ugly death, with the archive deleted on 15 December that year. Everything that had once been a Yahoo club had already been carried into it, converted from a board into a mailing list, and went into the same hole nineteen years later.

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