Top brass in Yahoo Labs have left, and the company has moved to kill off digital magazines and other products in the past few months. In February Yahoo announced that it was laying off 15 percent of employees. The announcement comes as Yahoo reviews strategic options, including a reverse spin of certain properties. The change affects the legacy Messenger clients on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. We intend to continue our focused efforts on the new Messenger, with a goal of delivering the best experience to our users 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. 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. 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. The app is live today on iOS and Android in global markets.Here’s how Yahoo explains the move in a blog post: ![]() It’s not clear, then, if Yahoo will target user acquisition in emerging markets like India, or if it’s hoping to actually grow a base here in the U.S. Yahoo also didn’t clarify its user acquisition strategy, when asked, beyond touting the app’s feature set as how it plans to grow its user base. It’s also very difficult to break into the messaging space today, in a market that’s dominated by major apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, and others. It’s unclear how much attention Yahoo Together will receive, as Yahoo previously experimented with a group money pool app, Tanda, which was shut down only months after launch. “We believe this is where this app sets us apart from others in the space, by focusing on the consumer needs to engage with their communities,” he adds. “Our focus is to create the best product for our audiences and the opportunity with consumer productivity in a group messaging context,” says Albers. This makes it easier for people to keep up with just the conversations they need to be involved in – like a surprise party for mom or dad, or those they care about – like a sports team’s practice schedule – as opposed to scrolling through long message threads.ĭuring the beta, Albers says Yahoo Together saw five times the number of messages per day, compared with Yahoo Messenger, which the team felt was a promising metric.įollowing today’s launch, the team plans to roll out more features as the app continues to evolve. ![]() You don’t have to add everyone from the main group chat to the topic-based sidechat, either. These topic-based chats aren’t just new chat rooms you set up by adding people you know from your contacts, but rather function as subsets to a main group chat. But the pound sign was actually adopted for use within IRC networks decades ago to label channels, and Yahoo credits IRC for the idea, in this case. It does use the hash symbol for its side conversations, which people may recognize from Slack. But unlike Skype or Slack, it doesn’t have support for calls, and the topic-based chats aren’t designed the same way. This, along with support for file attachments and a more robust search interface than Messenger, makes Yahoo Together feel more like a hybrid of consumer group chat and a tool that could fit more into the productivity space, like Skype or Slack. “What’s unique to Yahoo Together is that it allows you to create long running groups, but create an infinite amount of separate topics to organize conversations, and where helpful, limit access to some of those topics to a subset of the group,” he says. (Oath also owns TechCrunch, but we were not given access to the beta version for testing, we should note. ![]() “In many apps, you have a set of people, and then a single thread,” explains Michael Albers, Oath VP and Head of Communications Products. While much of what the app offers – the ability to chat, share photos, GIFs, links, and reactions – isn’t unique to the messaging space, Yahoo hopes people will appreciate the organizational capabilities in Yahoo Together. However, Yahoo Together was built on a new messaging platform, we understand, though it still leverages some existing technology from Yahoo Messenger. ![]() The app, previously codenamed Squirrel while in beta, was built by the Communications Team at Yahoo – the same folks who previously worked on Yahoo Messenger. Designed for group chats between family, friends, clubs and others, Yahoo Together tries to differentiate itself from others through its ability to organize group conversations into separate topics, similar to the IRC model, and its ability to send smart reminders about upcoming events. Hello, Yahoo Together? Yep, Yahoo is returning to the messaging space today after closing its older app due to lack of use.
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