Yahoo Livetext

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

~ the last words ~

i missed livetext entirely. by mid 2015 i was 31, on whatsapp like every adult i knew in turkey. yahoo's mobile-strategy era was already running on borrowed time, and a yahoo ios app for silent video chat was not a thing that reached anybody in my circle. the app shipped in the us on july 29, 2015 and was killed eight months later, mostly out of view of anyone outside the tech press.

the pitch was that two cameras would open at the same time without sound, and you would type messages on top of the live face of whoever you were talking to. yahoo positioned this as the calm part of mobile messaging, the half of a video call where you got to read someone's reactions while waiting for them to type their response. snapchat had taught the market that an ephemeral camera could be a chat client. livetext tried to extract the silent-watching part of that idea and ship it as its own thing.

the data showed how that went. the app debuted in the us app store top 150 in launch week. within two weeks it had fallen out of the top 1,000. that is not a slow decline. that is people downloading it, opening it once, then putting it down.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

livetext was built by the messageme team that yahoo acquihired in october 2014. messageme itself had turned down a reported 1.5 billion dollar offer the prior year and then settled for a reported 25 million from yahoo when the offer evaporated. by the time livetext shipped the founders were already arguing internally about what to build next, and the messageme cofounder arjun sethi who led the livetext effort would leave yahoo in february 2016.

the silent-video idea read interesting on paper. in practice the part of a video call you would skip was the part livetext kept. nobody wants to look at someone's face for ten seconds while they pick out their next sentence. the format might have worked as a feature inside a bigger messenger, but as a standalone product it had nothing to fall back on.

~ the postmortem ~

arjun sethi left yahoo in february 2016. one month later, on march 11, yahoo announced a list of products it was killing as part of what marissa mayer called simplification. yahoo games and yahoo livetext both went on the list. several regional yahoo sites followed in the same week.

the few users livetext had were told to migrate to yahoo messenger. yahoo messenger itself was killed two years later. its successor squirrel was renamed yahoo together and then killed in april 2019. the whole product line ended at zero.

~ what got buried with it ~

livetext is in this catalog because the death tells you more than the life did. yahoo at this point was acquiring messenger teams every other quarter and then sunsetting the resulting apps before the founders' first vesting cliff hit. messageme is in this graveyard too. so is beluga. the whole layer of mobile messenger acquihires from 2010 to 2016 looks the same in retrospect. small teams sold for modest prices. each one got a quiet friday shutdown notice about twenty months later.

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