Re:Yahoo Messenger shutting down, new messaging app Yahoo Sq...
by JoeAltmaier on Friday June 08, 2018 @09:46AM
(#17265276)
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.
Re:Yahoo Messenger shutting down, new messaging app Yahoo Sq...
by darrenf on Friday June 08, 2018 @09:50AM
(#17265326)
> 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)
Re:Yahoo Messenger shutting down, new messaging app Yahoo Sq...
by oblio on Friday June 08, 2018 @10:01AM
(#17265435)
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.
Re:Yahoo Messenger shutting down, new messaging app Yahoo Sq...
by toast0 on Friday June 08, 2018 @09:56AM
(#17265375)
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.
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.