Yahoo! Messenger

~ before the end ~

Yahoo! Messenger debuted in March 1998 as "Yahoo! Pager" and was renamed in 1999. It ran for two decades. Yahoo retired it on July 17, 2018, with a polite blog post directing users to a new "Yahoo, which is why together" group-messaging product that itself was shut down within a year.

At its peak in the early-to-mid 2000s, Yahoo! Messenger was the dominant messenger in southeast Asia and the Middle East, with strongholds in the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, and Iran, while it also had a major share in India and parts of Latin America. North Americans largely used AIM. Eastern Europeans largely used ICQ. South Asians and southeast Asians used Y!M. The geographic distribution was tribal.

~ the BUZZ ~

The single most aggressive notification in computing history. You typed BUZZ! into a chat window, and the recipient's window shook violently across their entire screen, accompanied by a loud sound. There was no way to disable it. There was no rate limit. People who held grudges sent buzz after buzz after buzz. People who were in love sent one buzz, perfectly timed. Y!M's nudge (later shipped on MSN) was a quieter cousin. The BUZZ was the original.

~ the emoticons ~

Yahoo! Messenger's emoticon library was, frankly, the best in the messenger industry from 2002 to 2008. Animated, expressive, sometimes obscene, always specific. There were two layers: the basic visible emoticons and the hidden ones. Specific text strings that triggered animations not in the menu. :-h was a wave. :-bd was a thumbs-up. (?) was a question mark sticker. :-bz was a person banging their head on a wall. There were dozens of these, hidden, and discovering one was a moment of real internet joy.

~ the chat rooms ~

Yahoo's public chat rooms were the most-used freely-accessible chat rooms on the global internet from about 2000 to 2008. Organized by interest, by language, by region. "Politics 1," "Karachi 2," "Romance & Relationships 4," "Christian Singles 1." Many had thousands of users at once, while many were also infested with bots advertising webcam scams.

Yahoo shut the chat rooms down in 2012, citing moderation costs and safety concerns. The actual reason was that the chat rooms had become an unmoderatable mess: 90% spam bots, 10% lonely teenagers and oddly devoted middle-aged regulars who knew each other by handle. The chat rooms had been the social network of an entire era of the internet, and their shutdown was barely noticed by the press.

~ cause of death ~

Yahoo as a company did not fail at any one thing. They failed at most things slowly. Yahoo! Messenger died as part of the general softening of Yahoo, while verizon bought Yahoo for $4.48 billion in 2017 (Marissa Mayer-era valuations had peaked higher) and immediately began shedding the parts they did not want. Yahoo! Messenger was one of the things they did not want.

The 2018 shutdown announcement gave users five weeks to download their chat history. Most users did not. Most users had not opened Y!M in five years, but the shutdown was a formality.

~ the hole it left ~

The chat rooms. We do not have a modern equivalent of "walk into a public chat room and meet seven strangers from Karachi who want to argue about the Pakistan-India cricket match." Reddit threads are read-only. Twitter replies are public-broadcast. Discord servers are gated by invite. Yahoo's chat rooms were instant, shared physical-feeling space. They are gone and nothing has replaced them.

The hidden emoticons. The shareable secret of :-bz. The internet does not have undocumented features anymore. Everything is in the help docs.

The messenger as an entrance. For most users in the global south who came online between 2000 and 2010, Yahoo! Messenger was the literal first piece of software they installed after the browser. It was a generation's introduction to "talking to a stranger in another country."

~ what people said ~

"my husband and i met in yahoo chat room 'Romance & Relationships 7' in 2003. he was in mumbai. i was in karachi. we are now in toronto. our daughters know they exist because of a yahoo chat room. they think it is funny. it is not.". s.q. 47

"i practiced my english by buzzing strangers in 'english conversation 4' for two hours every night between 2002 and 2005. my english is now better than the people i learned from. wherever they are, they are why.", m.r. 38

"my y!m id was lonelygurl_pakistan_27. i was 14. it caused some issues.". f.h. 36