Old Yahoo Messenger to bid farewell on Aug. 5

After “buzzing” chat boxes of millennials and connecting long-lost friends for 18 years, the throwback software Yahoo Messenger, or widely known as YM, is expected to drop its curtain on Aug. 5.

YM was launched in 1998 under the name “Yahoo Pager,” and the popular messaging software that made high school and college days memorable had an upgrade last year.

In a blog post, Yahoo Chief Architect Amotz Maimon said, “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.”

According to reports from tech news sites VentureBeat and Engadget, YM users will no longer be able to log into the software messenger and through third-party software on Yahoo’s Application Programming Interface after the said date. The refreshed model of Yahoo Messenger will be available on App Store and Google Play. Archived conversations will be deleted as well after Aug. 5.

The move to halt the soon-to-be-defunct messenger is a strategy to “level-up” with other messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, Viber and WhatsApp.

As stated in the same post, the Yahoo Recommends feature, which suggests users on articles to browse and read, will be permanently disabled on Sept. 1. Gianna Francesca Catolico