Obituary to Yahoo Messenger (Mar 9 1998 - July 17 2018)


On 17th July 2018, one of the last frontiers of internet boom bites the dust. Yahoo Messenger has been permanently shut down. 20 years is a very young age to die but in internet market it's considered as a substantial period. Yahoo messenger can be considered as a first generation dating software where people from different countries and continents can chat with each other using different chat rooms. There were similar software such as MSN messenger and AOL instant messenger but none had been as popular as Yahoo messenger. Yahoo messenger was a tool many urban kids of India loved to use. They thought they can talk to people and improve their English. So many Indian kids sat in dingy internet cafe equipped with dial-up connection and chatted with yahoo messenger for long time. But there was a serious flaw in the whole concept. The flaw was identifying who is on the other side. But internet boom is all about anonymity. So yahoo quite well played with it. As the user base and popularity increased, many bots invaded the yahoo chat rooms. People also encountered many financial scams originating from Philippines, Nigeria and other African countries. Webcam was one such tool where you can see others and people used it to the full extent. As the news of its permanent shut down came, electronic media (twitter and Facebook) were flooded with rest in peace messages about Yahoo Messenger.

I have also fond memories of Yahoo messenger where I met several people via chat rooms and made life long friendship with them. Have used Yahoo messenger for a considerable time and have seen the good, bad and the ugly face of the world through the software. The living people only gets old and wiser, so from every experience I got wiser. 

Rest in peace Yahoo Messenger.

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