Yahoo! Messenger

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

~ the obituary ~

yahoo messenger launched in march 1998 as "yahoo pager" and was renamed yahoo messenger in 1999. it was always the third-place messenger in most markets. AIM had north america. MSN had europe and asia. ICQ had the technical and russian audience. yahoo had everywhere left over, plus a real presence in southeast asia and the philippines.

in turkey, yahoo messenger was always there but never dominant. i had it installed because some of my contacts only had yahoo. you would log into yahoo just to talk to one or two specific people, then close it and go back to MSN. yahoo's actual strength was in the chatroom culture, which had the loudest reputation in the early 2000s for being where people went to flirt with strangers.

yahoo announced the shutdown in june 2018. the service stopped on 17 july 2018. they pointed people at a new product called "yahoo squirrel," which never went anywhere. yahoo as a company has been in slow decline since 2008 and most of its products have followed.

~ the case file ~

~ the BUZZ ~

the most distinctive yahoo messenger feature was BUZZ. you typed BUZZ! in a chat (or hit a button) and the recipient's chat window shook violently with a loud sound effect. it was the loudest possible way to get someone's attention.

people abused this constantly. you would BUZZ someone, they would BUZZ back to say sorry, you would BUZZ again to say no really sorry, and so on, until somebody actually started typing a real message. for a few years in the early 2000s, BUZZ wars were a real form of casual communication, the way ping wars are with whatsapp now but louder.

MSN had a similar feature called the nudge, which was a more polite shake. yahoo's BUZZ was bigger, louder, and shook the whole desktop. you could BUZZ someone and their boss in the next office could hear it. that was the whole pitch.

~ the emoticons ~

yahoo messenger had the best emoticon library of any consumer messenger of the era. there were hidden emoticons you typed with secret codes that would render as small animated icons. there was a guitar-playing emoji long before there was an emoji standard. there was a coffee cup. there was a pirate. there was a smiley wearing sunglasses lighting a cigarette.

the emoticons had a 320x240 cartoon quality that was specific to yahoo. they animated. they had personality. when standardized unicode emojis took over in the 2010s, the yahoo era of designed-with-care emoticons disappeared. modern emojis are technically better and aesthetically worse. nothing now has the personal-cartoon feel of a 2003 yahoo emoticon.

~ the chatrooms ~

yahoo had public chatrooms organized by topic, region, and age range. these were both very popular and very rough. early-2000s yahoo chatrooms were full of bots, spammers, predators, and a real but shrinking percentage of actual humans trying to have conversations. by 2005 the chatrooms had a reputation problem severe enough that yahoo shut them down in 2012, before the rest of the messenger followed in 2018.

people in turkey used yahoo chatrooms to flirt with strangers, especially turkish-language regional chatrooms or international ones aimed at language exchange. some genuine friendships and relationships came out of those rooms. so did a lot of regret. it was a specific 2002-2005 experience that was hard to explain to anyone who came online later.

~ the end ~

yahoo messenger died slowly through the entire 2010s. the smartphone era was the main killer. yahoo never had a great mobile app. whatsapp took the international audience. facebook messenger took the social audience. by 2014 yahoo messenger had gone from a top-3 messenger to a niche product mostly used in southeast asia.

yahoo's purchase by verizon in 2017 sealed the fate. verizon had no use for messenger. on 5 june 2018 yahoo announced the shutdown. on 17 july 2018 the servers went offline. users were given a few weeks to download their chat history.

~ what we lost ~

the BUZZ as a real social weapon. nothing in modern apps shakes the way yahoo's BUZZ shook. notifications are designed to be polite now. attention is something we are supposed to give freely, not have demanded violently. the BUZZ was demanding. that was its honest charm.

the emoticon library. nobody is making animated cartoon emoticons with personality anymore. unicode owns the emoji space. the yahoo style of "this guitar emoji has a real face and is winking at you" is over.

the chatroom format. for all its problems, yahoo chatrooms were one of the few places online where you could end up in a real-time conversation with strangers organized by topic. discord servers are the closest modern equivalent and they are not the same shape. the yahoo room was lighter, messier, smaller, and wider. discord is none of those things.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »