Yahoo has announced that it is shutting down the legacy platform of its chat service Yahoo Messenger. The company has asked all its users to transition to the new version introduced last year. The old Yahoo Messenger will no longer work from August 5 this year.
The chat service was introduced in 1998, and was very popular among Indian users then. The old version saw a decline in user base eventually, with several new services rising to the fore, including Google Talk, social networks like Facebook, and smartphone chat apps like WhatsApp. Yahoo tried to revive its Messenger service by updating its Android and iOS apps, apart from its Web counterpart last year in December.
It brought along a completely new design, and many new features. The best among them was the new Unsend feature, which allows users to retrace their footsteps and undo sending messages. Explaining its move, Yahoo Chief Architect Amotz Maimon says, "In December of 2015, 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 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. We intend to continue our focused efforts on the new Messenger, with a goal of delivering the best experience to our users".
After August 5, users won't be able to access the old Yahoo Messenger, and it is recommended to transition to the new Messenger apps on web and mobile. Yahoo also recently introduced support for Hindi language on the app. The apps can be downloaded from here, while the latest web version is available here.
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