Yahoo! has a new killer app
Aug 09th, 2015
Two years ago Edward Snowden released a slow trickle of highly damaging revelations about the NSA and the erosion of privacy that affected people not just in the USA, but across the world. Yahoo! was one of the companies that tried to fight back using their legal resources, but with limited success.
As the revelations continued it became apparent that email, which we always knew to be insecure, was no longer the darling of the masses. The masses wanted something more. They wanted something that kept their conversations safe and private. They wanted to talk to their loved ones without having the feeling that someone was watching through the keyhole. They wanted to stop the corruption of Washington by the shadowy puppet masters. They wanted their democracy back.
Back in the summer of 2013, a post appeared on a niche forum called Hacker News, asking the users:
Many answered, but one user put out a challenge; a challenge to Yahoo! to step up, and build, sponsor and open source a replacement for email. The replacement had to be open source, secure, no metadata leakage and as easy to use as email is today. Absolute beginners with no technical skills would be able to pick it up without a problem:
Yahoo are slowly getting back on their feet. If there ever was a perfect time to release a killer app that would resonate with the majority, it would be this.
Go on Yahoo. I dare you!
— Junto
What the user ‘Junto’ didn't know was that someone from Yahoo! was reading the post, and took the idea to Marissa Mayer. The challenge was accepted and in secret Yahoo! set out to build the biggest change to the internet since it started — the email replacement. They called it the Open Messaging Service (OMS).
Forward to today and OMS is taking the world by storm. A multi-million dollar industry has sprung up around the OMS concepts. Clients for various platforms are now available, whatever your preference, whether Mac, Unix, FirefoxOS, ChromeOS or Windows. Mobile and tablet clients are also plentiful, with a variety of innovative plugins and features being built into the software all the time. Yahoo’s YMessage client is the most popular client to date, with over 1 billion installs of the easy to use client.
The Github repo is most highly followed and contributed project in history and Yahoo’s share price is up to where Google was in 2013, before ‘those’ revelations about the company came to light.
Yahoo! is back on top. One killer app and some damning revelations were enough to turn the tech world on its head.
More importantly the NSA is screaming bloody murder. They can’t spy on everyone anymore. They shout and scream that the terrorists are going to kill us all. However, arrests are still made using standard policing methods, without the massive invasion of privacy that we came so close to never escaping.
Email is dead. Our old email accounts are just full of spam that we’ll never read.
The public won and Yahoo! is king… for the moment.
