After 20 Years, Yahoo Messenger is Finally Shutting Down Next Month!

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Seattle, United States – December 17th, 2011: Close up of Yahoo Messenger web page on Goolge Crome browser, one of the most popular voice, video and text messengers on the internet.

After 20 years of existence, Yahoo Messenger would cease to exist come July 17!

This stoppage of service was made known by Oath – the Verizon subsidiary which owns Yahoo and AOL. Yahoo would be putting to rest its instant messaging platform Yahoo Messenger (which originally debuted in 1998 as Yahoo Pager) in July, which is indeed the end of an era for the iconic messaging platform.

The platform is one of the very first instant messaging apps on the market that was very popular among Internet users back then.

There currently isn’t a replacement product available for Yahoo Messenger. We’re constantly experimenting with new services and apps, one of which is an invite-only group messaging app called Yahoo Squirrel (currently in beta) –Oath.

As a peace offering, although not a direct replacement for Yahoo Messenger, users are being advised to try out its new group messaging app, Squirrel, which is still an invite-only group messaging app which will be rolled out to the public when Yahoo Messenger shuts down. Interested members can request for an invite here.

The company gave no specific reason for the demise of Yahoo Messenger but saying it would be “focusing on building and introducing new, exciting communications tools that better fit consumer needs.” However, the reason may not be far-fetched, given the huge dominance of the messaging landscape by platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Wechat amongst others which has left the platform with little or no impact (even with its recent update).

And as a last Hooray, Yahoo makes a provision for users to download their entire chat history on Messenger for the next six months by going here. Note that the downloaded files would go straight to your computer or device, and not to any other messaging app.


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