Yahoo Squirrel / Yahoo Together

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

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i heard about yahoo squirrel was reading the obituary for yahoo messenger. that was june 2018. yahoo had announced that messenger would shut down on july 17 and that users would be redirected to a new group chat product called squirrel that was already in invite-only beta. i remember the article specifically because the headline was the only news anyone in turkey was going to absorb about that whole branch of yahoo's mobile portfolio. by 2018 nobody around me still had a yahoo account they were actively using.

squirrel had opened on may 8, 2018 as a closed beta. the pitch was simple enough that the launch coverage barely had to explain it. you created a group and invited people by sending them a link. conversations happened inside that group rather than on a wider contact list. it was a messenger with no friend graph and no discovery surface, just a series of named rooms.

in october 2018 yahoo renamed the app yahoo together. the new name was supposed to signal a repositioning, away from the squirrel pun and toward something that sounded like a family messaging product. the rename did nothing for usage. six months later yahoo together went offline on april 4, 2019 with no replacement product. the line of yahoo messengers that started in 1998 and ran for twenty years finally ended at zero subscribers with no successor.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

squirrel was an admission by yahoo that the era of public friend lists and discovery feeds in messaging was over. whatsapp had already won the global group chat layer. slack had taken the work-team part and discord was taking the community part. yahoo's pitch for squirrel was a smaller version of the family-and-friends conversation that whatsapp had already locked down. there was no obvious reason for a user to pick yahoo's version unless they had a long-standing yahoo email and no other chat habit. that user did not exist in meaningful numbers by 2018.

~ the day it died ~

yahoo together's shutdown notice went out in march 2019 with a hard date of april 4. users got a brief in-app warning and a recommendation to migrate their group chats elsewhere. there was no export tool for chat history. the april 4 cutoff came and went, and the app stopped accepting new logins. the team that had built squirrel had mostly already moved on inside oath by that point. verizon was preparing its own announcement that it was looking to sell oath and write down most of the value it had paid for yahoo and aol two years earlier.

~ the funny part ~

the funny part of the squirrel arc is the name. yahoo messenger had been running since 1998. it had carried twenty years of cultural weight in places like india and southeast asia where smiley-laden yahoo chat had been a primary friend-and-family channel for half a generation. messenger replaced caramail in some markets and competed with msn messenger in others. when yahoo replaced that brand, it picked squirrel. by the time the company recognized the brand mistake and renamed to yahoo together, the product had already lost the only window it had to capture the messenger user base. the rename came months too late, and the product itself was killed half a year after that.

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