Long before the world was introduced to Orkut, Facebook and Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger was a popular choice to connect with friends or strangers. Long gone are the days when people used to exchange ASL (Age, Sex, Location) or create those cool avatars. As the digital world evolved, the social networking took a major leap forward, leaving behind the likes of Yahoo Messenger.
As we moved on to the new modes of social networking, such as Facebook and Twitter, Yahoo has decided to do the same. The legacy Yahoo Messenger is counting its final days as the web search platform logs out of it permanently on Aug. 5, 2016. In Yahoo's words, the death of the legacy Messenger is merely a transition to its new Messenger, which was launched across all platforms and Mail in December 2015.
"While today we provide basic interoperation between the legacy product and the new Messenger, we encourage all of our users to complete their transition to the new Yahoo Messenger as we will no longer support the legacy platform as of August 5, 2016," Yahoo chief architect Amotz Maimon wrote in an official blog post last week. "We intend to continue our focused efforts on the new Messenger, with a goal of delivering the best experience to our users."
Despite it being almost two decades old, VentureBeat pointed out that the classic Messenger was popular in the Asia-Pacific region. According to Bloomberg, Yahoo Messenger continues to serve as a platform to bid and exchange commodities prices among oil traders. But these may be the only people using the legacy service, which clearly isn't enough to keep a behemoth alive.
But those who once used the Yahoo Messenger in the good old days are gloomy over Yahoo's decision. People are expressing their grief on Twitter. Below are few tweets that show the Yahoo Messenger will be missed:
If you are willing to move on, the new Messenger is available on Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
