
Yahoo Messenger shutting down, new messaging app Yahoo Squirrel is in beta - thecodeboy
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/08/yahoo-messenger-is-shutting-down-on-july-17-redirects-users-to-group-messaging-app-squirrel/
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kethinov
Sad to see, but I've been waiting for this moment for years.

My first "real" job was as an intern on the Yahoo! Messenger team where I
worked on both the Windows and Mac versions more than ten years ago.

Back in those days while I had been sad that XMPP never took off, I had
accepted that if you wanted to make cool IM client interfaces and get them in
front of a lot of real people, you had to work on one of the big popular
proprietary ones.

It was an amazing experience working on it. When I went back to school after
the internship, I observed people at school who I never met using features I
wrote during my internship! How cool is that? Given that experience, I've
always had a soft spot for Yahoo! and dreaded the growing inevitability of
today's announcement.

In the years since, my passion for IM has been a largely sad one. I promoted
Google Talk heavily when it came out due to it being based on XMPP, only to
see Google bait and switch us. Then I resigned myself back to proprietary IM
hell for a while as getting people to use XMPP seemed increasingly ridiculous
as its user experience lagged further and further behind Hangouts, iMessage,
etc, etc...

Then eventually the Riot IM client came out and I got excited about IM again.
One of many clients built atop the new Matrix protocol which styles itself as
a successor to XMPP, Riot was the first IM client I'd ever used that felt like
it rivaled the big players in IM in terms of user experience.

While my career has moved on from coding IM clients, I am glad to say I've
helped the Matrix/Riot folks a small amount with coding and localization. And
most importantly I cheer them on publicly and privately every chance I get.

~~~
PaulHoule
What I don't get, as an outsider, is how these chat clients don't seem to
change over time in any kind of progressive direction.

It seems that products like AIM, ICQ, Facebook Messenger, Skype, cuseeme, etc.
go through this lifecycle of (a) reaching MVP status, (b) stagnation, (c)
deterioration and (d) people jumping ship to some other product at stage (a).

The new product seems better than the deteriorated old product but doesn't
seem better than I remember the old product being back when it was at
stage(a). Why?

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eps
(b) is not stagnation, it’s feature completeness.

For example, Skype hit that very early on - you were able to make and receive
voip calls of a very good quality, zeroconf, for free. It really didn’t need
anything else. It just did one thing really well. That’s not stagnation.

~~~
charlesdm
I don't know if this was because Skype was developed before the “mobile wave",
but to this day it's still not a great app to make calls from through mobile.

Whenever I'm calling over 3G/4G it often disconnects, and I'm not the only
person who seems to have this issue.

WhatsApp seems to be a lot better for mobile calling

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mbowcutt
These Web 2.0 service names are getting out of hand.

~~~
OzzyB
Not sure we're still in Web 2.0, if we were it would be called Squirrl.

Maybe it's time to bump the version number to 3.0?

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k3liutZu
sqrl

~~~
strictnein
Which would be hosted at sqrl.io, naturally.

~~~
pavel_lishin
[http://messenger.squirrel](http://messenger.squirrel)

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pavel_lishin
I haven't thought about Yahoo Messenger in years, maybe a decade+. I'm looking
forward to see what my chat logs from back then contain; I think it might have
been my primary communication method in high school.

~~~
Exuma
Fun (actually it's not very fun) story... Some years ago I went and visited my
parents house where I grew up. I actually found my old computer in the attic,
that I hadn't used since I was 15-16 or so.

I was excited to see what it contained. Among it was a bunch of saved memes
(remember when memes used to last like a year instead of 15 hours?).

I also found AIM chat logs that I decided to look at. I was absolutely shocked
by what I saw (I mean, really floored).

I was SO ... so.... so..... incredibly negative. I mean, where every word was
scathing, hurt, defensive, judgmental, awful. It was absolutely painful to
read, BUT, it showed me something really eye opening which was that, I think
fairly early on in my life I realized I was like this and I tried everything
in my power to do things outside my comfort zone and to force myself to grow
past negativity. It really pleased me to see that because it showed me my
efforts worked, as currently (and at the age when I visited my parents, maybe
29 or 30), I'm generally very happy, not judgmental.. I do get irritated at
some things and I'm not perfect of course, but I would give myself an 8 out of
10 on the carefree/happy/non-judgmental scale.

So, all in all was a good, albeit super salty, experience.

Edit; I Should probably mention I do reserve quite a bit of judgment (cough*
you dont use vim????) in my technical sphere, but this post is mostly
referring to personal things.

~~~
bovermyer
I had a similar experience when I rediscovered my Livejournal from back in the
day.

If I didn't know I was the one that wrote it, I would've considered the author
either an angsty ragemonster or just a plain old sociopath.

My, how the years change us. I'm really happy, compared to where I was 20ish
years ago.

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gregknicholson
(That website won't let me read it unless I “consent” to tracking.)

Which communication protocol is this using? XMPP? Matrix? ActivityPub? A well-
specified encryption scheme on top of email?

I'm guessing this is yet another communication app that won't communicate with
anything but itself, because its features are so very unique and innovative.

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mtgx
Yahoo Messenger used to be _at least_ as popular as WhatsApp or Facebook
Messenger are right now in certain countries (at least in terms of percentage
of internet users in their respective periods).

Yahoo Messenger losing its relevance was an even bigger failure than Google
killing Gtalk (at least Google sort of continued it through the resource and
data hog Hangouts).

~~~
empath75
Aim and yahoo both threw away massive social networks through neglect.

~~~
Larrikin
Did they? I used both heavily from elementary school through a large portion
of college. They constantly added features and it was a time when it was
exciting to receive updates. I feel they just went through the natural social
network lifecycle. My friends and I didn't try Facebook and others because
there was a problem. They were simply new.

~~~
basch
Imagine if yahoo had added web chat to the bottom of every yahoo, yahoo news,
yahoo finance, yahoo sports, yahoo fantasy etc page, ala Facebook. No-matter
where you go on yahoo, your buddies are on the right, and chat windows on the
bottom. Page reloads would not disrupt chat.

Imagine.

Same goes for AOL. No other company really understands what facebook has done
yet. They have a two layer app, that lets you use both parts simultaneously,
independently, or together. Its a different form of window management. I can
drag from the background news app to the foreground chat app to share a post
in a message.

~~~
Larrikin
Honestly sounds terrible and distracting. I miss the dedicated client that
would just be another unassuming program unless I was actively chatting. Ive
moved over to messenger.com and the dedicated hangouts page because it's
harder to have a conversation when so much other stuff is vying for your
attention. Still frustrating that I have to remember to open tabs for a bunch
of different sites.

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bovermyer
I wasn't aware it was still online...

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sitepodmatt
Somewhat offtopic, but related - Any else remember Yahoo Messenger (new beta)
being an evangelist for WPF in the mainstream? Which didn't pan out iirc,
infact did any mainstream commercials apps, thus excluding internal LOBs
launch, even make it on to WPF? ~2009

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maxxxxx
Visual Studio started using WPF from 2010 on. It turned out not to be an
exactly convincing example. It was slower than VS 2008 and lost a ton of
features. Can't think of any other commercial app. MS certainly didn't bother
porting anything to WPF.

~~~
setquk
Don’t forget that UWP is the bastard child of WPF

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maxxxxx
And Silverlight and WinRT. I still don't understand why they couldn't keep
developing WPF instead of shipping a new framework every 2 years.

~~~
bunderbunder
Pessimistic answer:

Ever seen that joke graphic with the org charts of various tech companies,
where Microsoft's is a bunch of nodes with little hands sticking out and
pointing guns at each other?

WPF was a product of the .NET team. WinRT was owned by the Windows team. The
two have had a rivalry that's famous for producing collateral damage.

Optimistic answer:

WinRT was designed to be consumable from many languages and platforms, not
just .NET. They preserved as much as they could (e.g., xaml), but you can't
rewrite the core of a thing without a few growing pains.

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emidln
I don't know if YMSG is still supported, but it's sad to think the first
network protocol I spent serious time reversing is now dead.

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hodgesrm
This is off-topic but...reading the article I wondered what happened to all
that personal information we put into services like Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo
Mail?

At least in the US there is no guardrail that would prevent mining the data
for any purpose its current overlords deem useful. That includes reselling it
to others.

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kumarvvr
Who uses Yahoo still? Genuinely curious. I thought it was dead.

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joecool1029
Oil traders apparently.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-traders-
yahoo/bytes-a...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-traders-yahoo/bytes-
and-barrels-the-origins-of-oil-traders-love-of-yahoo-idUSKCN1080CU)

~~~
hermitdev
I think it's traders in general. I know it's used by US equities traders. I
think it was referenced as being used in the LIBOR manipulation scandal, as
well.

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oceanghost
I met my ex-wife on Yahoo messenger.

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AJRF
Yahoo make great mobile products, looking forward to seeing Squirrel

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santoshmaharshi
ASL :(

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gyvastis
Who thinks of these names anyways?

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Jaruzel
My guess its driven by what .com domain name they can afford to buy off
someone.

I'd happily sell jaruzel.com to any company who wants to name their app after
me. I'm worth about $1m I think.

