If you are in your late 20s or early 30s, then the words “Yahoo Messenger” strike an instant sense of nostalgia.
However, after 20 years of existence Yahoo Messenger will permanently shut down on July 17, bringing down the curtains on one of the oldest online chat applications still in existence.
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Earlier today Oath, which owns Yahoo Messenger, announced that the service is officially being discontinued from July 17 onwards. The company’s taking this step to evaluate how it can stay competitive in the instant messaging space, currently dominated by Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and other mobile apps.
Yahoo Messenger debuted way back in March of 1998 as Yahoo Pager, in the early days of the Internet when instant messaging was very much done on desktop PCs. This was a faster and cheaper alternative to email and SMSes, respectively.
According to a Techcrunch report, Oath doesn’t have a replacement product available for Yahoo Messenger. But that they’re “constantly experimenting with new services and apps, one of which is an invite-only group messaging app called Yahoo Squirrel (currently in beta).”
Squirrel is a group messaging app Yahoo’s currently testing out, and one can try it out by requesting access to its beta.
Over the last 20 years, around several hundreds of millions of people actually used Yahoo Messenger. And while it’s shutting down next month, Oath confirms that Yahoo ID will still continue to work for accessing other services like Yahoo Mail and other services.
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