Sure you
know and are fond of squirrels ! ~ heard of ‘Yahoo squirrel’ ? (pic credit :
sciencing.com)
There are
things in life which one feels are the most important but with passage of time,
becomes redundant ! ~ in Big Street was
the edifice of Sri Parthasarathi Post Office, an attractive building having a
couple of fruit bearing trees – ever busy – a time when filling up money-order
form was an art. People used to send
post cards, inland letters, covers and the like – postal stamps and revenue
stamps were regularly bought and part of every household. When was the last
time, you ever sent a letter writing by hand ? – in our generation, we saw
‘telegrams’ as the fastest means of communicating ‘news of passing away of
persons’; then appointment letters, persons arriving in a city etc., - quite
unfortunately, we also witnessed the demise of ‘telegram’ itself – the near
stopping of personal use of card/covers and fading away of importance of Post
Office too .. . . .. ..
Have read some ‘Odes’ .. ..
.. an ode (from Ancient Greek: ōdḗ) is a type of lyrical stanza. It is an
elaborately structured poem praising or glorifying an event or individual,
describing nature intellectually as well as emotionally. Greek odes were originally poetic pieces
performed with musical accompaniment.
Travelling back to early
1990s, people used to open email accounts with pride – the most prized
possessions were ‘hotmail’ and ‘yahoo’ accounts – I remember having an
mantraonline / sify / rediff and some other accounts too.
Yahoo! is a web
services provider headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and now wholly owned by Verizon Communications. The original Yahoo! company was founded by
Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2,
1995. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of
the early Internet era in the 1990s.
Before we started ‘googling’
for everything – we used search engine
Yahoo! Search, and related services, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail,
Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online
mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports, and its social media website. At its
height it was one of the most popular sites in the United States. According to third-party web analytics
providers Alexa and SimilarWeb, Yahoo! was the most widely read news and media
website – with over 7 billion views per month – ranking as the
sixth-most-visited website globally in 2016.
‘old order changeth –
yielding place to new’ – as with many popular things that have faded away –
Yahoo too slowly declined, starting in
the late 2000s, and in 2017 Verizon Communications acquired most of Yahoo's
Internet business for $4.48 billion, excluding its stakes in Alibaba Group and
Yahoo! Japan which were transferred to Yahoo's successor company Altaba.
Most of us who have Facebook
installed in our mobiles are addicted to its messenger too .. .. .. Yahoo!
Messenger (sometimes abbreviated Y!M) is an advertisement-supported instant
messaging client and associated protocol provided by Yahoo!. Yahoo Messenger is
provided free of charge and can be downloaded and used with a generic
"Yahoo ID" which also allows access to other Yahoo! services, such as
Yahoo! Mail, where users can be automatically notified when they receive new
email. Yahoo! also offers PC-to-PC, PC-to-Phone and Phone-to-PC service, file
transfers, webcam hosting, text messaging service, and chat rooms in various
categories.
Yahoo!
Messenger was originally launched under the name Yahoo! Pager on March 9, 1998.
In
addition to instant messaging features similar to those offered by ICQ, it also
offers (on Microsoft Windows) features such as: IMVironments (customizing the
look of Instant Message windows, some of which include authorized themes of
various cartoons such as Garfield or Dilbert), address-book integration and
Custom Status Messages. It was also the
first major IM client to feature BUZZing and music-status. Another recently
added feature is customized avatars. Yahoo Messenger also allows users to
access Yahoo Chat Rooms.
As of March 27, 2016, the
only supported clients are the Android, iOS and web browser clients. The
original Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris clients are not supported anymore, and
their servers began shutting down on August 5, 2016, with the clients no longer
working by August 31, 2016. On April 12, 2016, Yahoo announced that the
messenger would support six non-English languages to bridge the language gap
and create personalised experiences for its users. Yahoo Messenger that time supported Hindi (on Android devices only),
Chinese, French, German, Spanish and Indonesian.. .. now
comes the news ath Yahoo Messenger will no longer be supported after July 17,
2018.
So July 17th
would mark the end for pioneer instant
messaging app Yahoo Messenger. Verizon subsidiary Oath announced it is planning
to shut down the messenger on July 17 – and is now redirecting users to its
brand new group messaging app Squirrel. “We know we have many loyal fans who
have used Yahoo Messenger since its beginning as one of the first chat apps of
its kind,” the statement reads. “As the communications landscape continues to
change over, we’re focusing on building and introducing new, exciting
communications tools that better fit consumer needs.” In place, the company is encouraging users to
sign up for Squirrel, which the company has been quietly beta-testing since
May. Squirrel is currently invite-only, but hopefully the app will be open to
the public by the time Yahoo Messenger gets shuttered.
Meanwhile, those interested
in early access to Squirrel can sign up for an invite code by following the
instructions on the app’s official website. The announcement further notes that
users will have six months to download their chat history from Yahoo Messenger;
you can find more about this here. While users can download the data to your
device, it appears that porting the history to another app won’t be an option.
So that marks the official
killing of Yahoo messenger
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
4th July 2018
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