what's yahoo messenger
On October 13, 2005, Yahoo and Microsoft announced plans to introduce interoperability between their two messengers, creating the second-largest real-time communications service userbase worldwide: 40 percent of all users (AIM currently holds 56 percent). The announcement comes after years of third-party interoperability success (most notably, Trillian, Pidgin) and criticisms that the major real-time communications services were locking their networks. Microsoft has also had talks with AOL in an attempt to introduce further interoperability, but so far, AOL seems unwilling to participate.
Interoperability between Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger was launched July 12, 2006. This allows Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger users to chat to each other without the need to create an account on the other service, provided both contacts use the latest versions of the clients. It was not possible to talk using the voice service among both messengers.
As of December 14, 2012, the interoperability between Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger ceased to exist.[3] The Live Messenger contacts will appear as greyed out and it will not be possible to send instant messages to them.
There are various games and applications available that can be accessed via the conversation window by clicking the games icon and challenging your current contact. It requires Java to work.
As of April 18, 2014, games were removed from Yahoo Messenger.[9]
Yahoo Chat (1998–2012)[edit]
Yahoo Chat was a free online chat room service provided exclusively for Yahoo! users. Yahoo! Chat was first announced on January 7, 1997, as it was confirmed to be a feature on the very first release of Yahoo! Pager. On March 9, 1998, the first public version of Yahoo! Pager was released, with Yahoo! Chat among its features. It allowed users to create public chat rooms, send private messages, and use emoticons.
In June 2005, with no advance warning, Yahoo disabled users' ability to create their own chat rooms. The move came after KPRC-TV in Houston, Texas reported that many of the user-created rooms were geared towardpedophilia. The story prompted several advertisers, including Pepsi and Georgia-Pacific, to pull their ads from Yahoo.[10]
On November 30, 2012, Yahoo announced that among other changes that the public chat rooms would be discontinued as of December 14, 2012.[4] quoting "This will enable us to refocus our efforts on modernizing our core Yahoo products experiences and of course, create new ones."
Until the chat rooms became unavailable on December 14, 2012, all versions of Yahoo! Messenger could access Yahoo chat rooms.
Yahoo has since closed down the chat.yahoo.com site (which is now a redirect to a section of the Yahoo! Messenger page) because the great majority of chat users accessed it through Messenger. The company is still working on a way to allow users to create their own rooms while providing safeguards against abuse. A greyed-out option to "create a room" was available until the release of version 11.
A recently added feature in Yahoo! Messenger allows users to connect with Facebook.
Yahoo Messenger users are subject to unsolicited messages (SPIM).[11][12] Yahoo's primary solution to the issue involves deleting such messages and placing the senders on an Ignore List.[13]
As of 2007, it was estimated that at least 75% of all users who used Yahoo chat rooms were bots.[14] Yahoo introduced a CAPTCHA system to help filter out bots from joining chat rooms, but such systems generally do little to prevent abuse by spammers.[15]
Release history[edit]
- Windows - 11.5.0.228 - March 13, 2012
- Mac OS X - 3.0.1 Beta (build 35554) - January 10, 2011
- Unix - 1.0.4 - September 2003. It can still be downloaded from Softpedia.
- Version 1.0.6 can be downloaded from the Unix Beta page
Yahoo released a preview version of Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista. It had been designed to exploit the new design elements of Vista's Windows Presentation Foundation and introduced a new user interface and features. It lacked some basic functions such as webcam support. It has since been discontinued.
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