Yahoo! Live

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

~ the goodbye ~

Ten months is not long enough to reach Turkey. In 2008 the chat window on every screen I knew was MSN, the way it had been since school, and Yahoo's presence in the country was a mail address and a messenger a few people kept installed for one contact who refused to switch. A live video experiment that opened in february and closed in december never crossed any of that. I found out it existed years later, reading about something else.

Yahoo opened it on 6 february 2008 as a limited preview and it collapsed the same night under its own traffic, with not enough bandwidth provisioned to serve the people who turned up to look. That was five days after Microsoft had made a public offer to buy the whole company, so the launch happened in the middle of the loudest week Yahoo had had in years, which is either very good timing or the worst possible timing.

The product itself was a copy and did not pretend otherwise. You made a channel and pointed the browser at your webcam, then broadcast to anyone who found you, while viewers watched in a window with a chat box down the side and could join in with a camera of their own. Justin.tv had shipped exactly that in 2007 and Ustream had shipped it too, along with Stickam and a half dozen others, because live video in those two years was the thing every company was told it needed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ ten months ~

Nothing dramatic happened in between. It worked, after the first night. People broadcast the things people broadcast at a webcam in 2008, which was mostly themselves in a bedroom talking to whoever showed up. It never found a reason for anyone to pick it over the sites that had been doing the same job for a year already, and Yahoo never gave it one.

The announcement came on 3 november 2008 and set the closing date a month out. That was two weeks after the company had cut ten percent of its staff, in the same stretch that killed a long list of Yahoo properties nobody at the top could explain the purpose of any more. Yahoo in late 2008 was a company deciding what it was, and a webcam site with no lead over Justin.tv was an easy paragraph in that memo.

~ the funny part ~

It went off at 7:07 in the evening, eastern time, on 3 december 2008. Whoever had the keys put the word kthxbai on the front page and walked away. That is internet slang from a specific and now quite distant era, roughly the sound of shrugging while leaving, and it is the only genuinely memorable thing the service ever produced.

The idea was correct, obviously. A channel per person with a chat box next to it is Twitch, which was assembled out of the wreckage of Justin.tv six years later and is now most of what live video means. Yahoo had the traffic to do it and put the product up before the technology or its own attention span could carry it. The epitaph fits: not a failure exactly, just a company saying bye without capital letters.

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