In Romania at least it was what Facebook is these days, basically. Everyone had an Yahoo user for Messenger (and Mail, but Messenger was bigger). Companies would post their Yahoo Messenger user on their sites and billboards (!) so that clients could contact them.

I can't fathom how they managed to not have decent clients for every mobile platform...

> But like other services in that first generation of messaging, Messenger’s role and functions were swiftly surpassed by faster and more functional mobile-based services, and specifically mobile messaging apps. Notably, WhatsApp was created by ex-Yahoo employees.

If we ignore the mobile aspect, almost no modern messenger has as many features as Yahoo Messenger used to have. Notably, it was one of the first messengers to have offline messages. You could set an "invisible" mode so that your friends (or boss) wouldn't see you online, either globally, or just per user (basically ignore user). It had a million features, some I still don't see in modern messaging clients.

Their Messenger platform as first written was a buggy, leaky Java mess. They 'solved' that by running thousands of blade servers and rebooting them round-robin every few hours. Instead of actually investing in the product by debugging/reimplementing for instance. I guess chat wasn't a glamorous product at Yahoo! so nobody wanted to waste their career on it.

> I guess chat wasn't a glamorous product at Yahoo! so nobody wanted to waste their career on it.

Perhaps not glamorous, but it was possibly the most dog-fooded product for all employees – at least IME. Literally every single person I ever interacted with while working there (for 11 years) used it as their primary means of communication with other colleagues. Up to and including David Filo (memories of "hey, Yahoo! Greece homepage is down, can you help?" popping up on my screen one morning)

It would make sense for it to be used by people. In Romania there was no big marketing campaign for it, so it basically spread just based on word of mouth reputation. It beat out MSN, ICQ, AOL quite handily. It was kind of a memory hog for the time and relatively unstable ocasionally but the set of features was great.

Yahoo went mobile very early (like 2000s with WAP and all that), saw little adoption and as a result didn't prioritize it; also, for at least until I left in 2011, 'mobile' was a central org that assisted properties, which was a giant pain to work with. Messenger mobile was there, but as an SMS gateway, not an app.

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

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.

After Aol bought time warner and the dotcom crash happened, time warner basically cut the team down to the bone. There were a handful of people working on it when I was at aol. Their big monetization play was selling enterprise AIM to a few brokerages on wall street.

AIM could have been facebook, it could have been slack, or skype. The management was just incredibly short sighted and couldn't figure out how to make money from it.

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.

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.

I think so, yeah. The networks were already there; if they had the foresight to see how FB would eat their lunch, they potentially could have integrated customizable user profile features w/ a "wall"-like functionality into the chat platform, and nipped FB in the bud when it was still perceived as a white-collar walled garden (a rep that persisted for a couple years even after they opened it up beyond EDU). "Facebook is for college snobs; Yahoo is for everyone!"

That's where Facebook really has done remarkably well: their users haven't moved on, like the users of AOL, MySpace &c. did. Why not? I don't really know. It could be that Facebook executes well, but it could also be that they got lucky: they were the first truly global social network (approximately ⅓ of the world use their product), and once someone got that big it would be difficult for any competitor to establish a foothold.

Facebook really hasn't been around that long. Thinking about my AOL usage, I was a regular user for nearly a decade and it continued supplementing my messaging needs for some years after that. I've been on Facebook for nearly the same amount of time, I got in when they opened it up to high school email accounts. It has become pretty common for me to talk to more and more people on services like Hangouts, LINE, Snapchat, even occasionally WeChat. Unlike AIM and Yahoo Messenger theres an ever increasing reason to move away from the Messenger/Facebook platform in the eyes of more and more people. The cycle is starting to play out. I think FB as a company will stick around longer since they continue to buy other popular platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp but someone will eventually decide not to sell.

Microsoft as well. MSN Messenger was absolutely massive in some countries.

and aim direct connect is still better for sending large files than anything we have now.