Yahoo! Kills! The! Messenger! Yahoo! is set to discontinue its Messenger app in just over a month's time. The remaining bits of the Purple Palace confirmed on Friday that, as of July 17, the service will be no more. "Until then, you can continue to use the service normally," Yahoo! says. "After July 17, you'll no longer be able to access your chats and …
Yeah, it was a TS//ECI Special Access program that was run by Royal Cape and whatever the Special Collection Service was called at the time that used genetically modified "super" rodents to break into embassies to plant listening devices. It wound up being spun down when most of the interesting embassies started using cats as a counterintelligence measure.
Even fonder memories of the time, before AltaVista and Google, when Yahoo! was the go-to place to find Web sites, the preferred directory.
Yahoo!'s strength was that every listing was approved by a real human, eliminating a lot of utter dreck.
Instead of gaming SEO to get a high ranking you actually had to submit your site to Yahoo! and hope they accepted it.
I remember back in the early days of hand curated web indexes some of the entries were quite humorous.
When many of the early sites with pictures of naked ladies consisted of images brazenly scanned from Playboy, Penthouse, and the like, I remember one site being listed with a comment something like 'Collection of copyright violations', and the next one in the list being 'More copyright violations'.
Destroyed by two harridan CEOs in quick succession, now Verizon (Oath) is applying the coup de grâce.
IMHO, Yahoo Messenger could have been sold to one of the Chinese chat apps, or LINE, or Kakaotalk. Or Telegram.
ICQ (and its famous flower icon and "uh-oh!" notification sound) is still alive and kicking, owned by a Russian company.
So either have the Third Department of the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission of China or the Russian Spetssvyaz slurping your information. Not exactly an ideal way of going about things but oh well if you don't care.
I mean at least NSA pretend to not collect everything. We all know better, but they still try to act like they don't.
Too true. They bought Coolpreviews an addon which previews links in mini pop-in pages. Makes browsing faster and cleaner. It is unique and nobody has written anything similar. The First thing they did was to shut it down. And Yahoo wonders why it's not popular? It part of the mentality of buying cool things then instantly destroying them. Kind of like a bully stamping on your lunch.
A little while ago a number of people experienced a strange occurrence, receiving notification of an access to their eMail accounts at a time well out of their regular habits, The stated time of access in the message was identical in all their accounts, highly unusual. The message was encouraging users to enter a mobile phone number for 2-factor identification. It appeared to be a valid internal message from Oath/Yahoo.
If you get one of these then change your password anyway. And while 2-factor Id is great for banking and important things, I am cautious in using 2-factor for everything.
The 'Free Mail' sites are more and more pushing to get your phone numbers, while advertising at you, I suggest to all they many need to select a provider closer to home and pay for something more reliable.
Why would you be 'cautious' in using 2-factor for whatever you like? I enabled it on absolutely everything that allowed me to. Unless of course you mean "2-factor by SMS to my phone" which I just have no interest in, using an open source TOTP app instead; the sites I use it on don't know any more about me than they did before - how I conjure up the 6-digit code they ask me for 2FA is none of their goddamn business.
No replacement ready
No way to transfer contacts to "Squirrel"
No way to transfer chats
Why bother?
In the end Squirrel is just a new chat program ... so why bother buying Yahoo at great cost? Hope the CEO is sacked ..actually he is retiring!
Yahoo stuffed Messenger several years ago. Wrecked .. Groups ...Calendars ...Flickr ...everything it touched .. never listened to the users... and they wondered why they failed?
Verizon only bought yahoo for their advertising business in order to boost their plans for mobile advertising incorporated into mobile TV. Yahoo is pretty much worthless even though everyone knows them, so it was just spare change for Verizon's monster budget
It makes as much sense as Microsoft buying Skype, destroying MSN Messenger to get everyone on Skype, and making Skype so shit to use and locking out older clients, phones, and TVs, that they effectively destroyed that too.
Only Squirrel isn't as well known so the whole enterprise is even more doomed to failure.
you try working in a department where everyone in the company knows you are available, you never get any work done for the constant interruptions.
I was required to use The Software Formerly Known As Lync at a previous employer. I hated it with the searing heat of a thousand suns.
I've managed to avoid it at my current gig, though; it seems that adding me to the company Skype cloud account would cost an apparently prohibitive ~ $2.50/mo. A rare case of bean counting FTW.
I never used yahoo messenger in my life, I mean yahoo itself was a pain to use when my first account was created, I remember my friend creating an account for me and swearing hard lol. He gave me alternatives but I liked the word "yahoo" and there we go. I can see yahoo mail dying as well.
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