Goodbye, Yahoo Messenger

Time to bid Goodbye to Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo, which has been closing down the shutters on several of its now redundant services has decided to bring curtains down on one of the oldest IM services still around — and one that introduced a significant portion of the 90s generation to the wonders of online messaging and chatting.

According to VentureBeat, users won’t be able to log in and send messages on the messenger or on the third party-clients that used its application programming interface for that matter.The change will affect the legacy messenger services on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS platforms.

The company says that the decision has been taken to ensure that users who still haven’t made the transition to Yahoo’s new, cross platform messenger platform which was launched last December, do so now. As per a Yahoo blog post,

“We announced a brand new Yahoo Messenger for mobile, the Web and in Yahoo Mail on the desktop, built on a new modern platform. This complete revamp brings users an incredibly fast, beautiful and smart way to send – and unsend – messages, photos, and animated GIFs in 1:1 and group conversations.

While today we provide basic inter-operation 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.”

The company is also shutting down its content recommendation engine, Yahoo Recommends on the 1st of September, 2016.

“To streamline and simplify products for our publisher community, we are discontinuing Yahoo Recommends on September 1, 2016.”

However, publishers can still use its monetization solutions to drive ROI across all screens.

Yahoo is probably trying to streamline its businesses and let go of all non-performing assets in order to make the company appear in a better light for prospective buyers.