Goodbye, Yahoo Messenger…
Thank you, and hope we use your progeny well
This Friday, Oath announced that they would be discontinuing Yahoo messenger on 17th July, and that users can migrate to Squirrel. Meanwhile, users have the option to download their chat history for another six months. Ah, I am sure about 16 people were relieved to hear that.
But in its two decades of existence, Yahoo Messenger firmed up its place in the annals of tech and communication history and forever etched its name in the memories of people who grew up in the early 2000s.
I distinctly remember my first brush with instant messaging on ICQ. I was visiting an elder cousin who introduced me to “ICQ white pages”. Looking at the gadget loaded kids of today, it is hard to imagine the absolute sense of amazement 10-year old me had at that moment.
One could search with one or more criteria making it possible to connect with strangers in far off lands, coming from varied ethnicities and age groups. I was able to have conversations — however trivial — with someone sitting in the US or Latin America, and it was mind-bogglingly exhilarating.
“Hi, ASL?” was all it took.
A Yahoo ID came next. Yahoo.com was so cool and happening a name that I was prompted not to choose a <firstname.lastname> username. After some thought, I went with ishanfido@ after the 7UP ad mascot Fido Dido. Ah, the naivety of childhood!
Yahoo messenger and its chat rooms made everyone believe that the world was shrinking. Laborious letters to pen-friends and long waits for elusive replies were a thing of the past it seemed. The pen-friends were right here. The world will be a small village and everyone would be #fam.
Cut to twenty years post the messaging revolution, and today the tables have reversed. What we gained in the virtual world was exactly what we lost IRL.
The ease of communication was so intoxicating that it led us to substitute the most basic face-to-face conversations or cheerful telephone conversations with bland text messages, peppering them with emoji in a desperate bid to retain the humanity of the interaction.
With group chats, we have a bunch of folks feverishly throwing their own opinions and updates into the mix, not pausing to listen to the other and, even worse, not even expecting a response on most occasions.
Tools of great value have turned into modern-day curses in our hands. The likes of Orkut and Yahoo Messenger, and the products they have given way to are meant to complement our real interactions, not substitute them. Let them be means to further friendships and not define them.
Remember, the real social network will always be offline.
