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Goodbye, Yahoo Messenger. Hello, Yahoo together? Yes, Yahoo is back in the messenger space today after closing its old application due to lack of use. Designed for group discussions with family, friends, clubs and more, Yahoo Together tries to differentiate itself from others by its ability to organize group conversations into separate topics, similar to the IRC model, and by its ability to send smart reminders about upcoming events.
The application, which was previously codenamed Squirrel in beta, was created by Yahoo's communications team – the same people who previously worked on Yahoo Messenger. However, Yahoo Together has been built on a new messaging platform, even though it still exploits some of Yahoo Messenger's existing technologies.
Although most of the application (chat capability, share photos, GIF files, links and reactions) is not unique in the email space, Yahoo hopes that people will appreciate Yahoo's organizational capabilities Together.
"In many applications, you have a group of people, then a single thread," says Michael Albers, Vice President of Oath and Head of Communication Products. (Oath also belongs to TechCrunch, but we did not have access to the beta for testing purposes, note it.) Corporate Synergies, Hurray!
"What's unique about Yahoo Together is that it allows you to create long groups, but to create an infinite number of separate topics to organize conversations and, when useful, limit access to some of these topics." to a subset of the group, "he says. .
This, coupled with support for attachments and a more robust search interface than Messenger, gives Yahoo Together the feeling of being a hybrid of consumer group discussion and a tool that could be more relevant. integrate into the productivity space, like Skype or Slack. But unlike Skype or Slack, calls are not supported and topic-based discussions are not designed in the same way.
He uses the hash symbol for his parallel conversations, which people can recognize from Slack. But the sign of the pound was actually adopted by the IRC networks decades ago to tag the channels, and Yahoo attributed this idea to IRC, in this case.
These topic-based discussions are not just new chat rooms that you've set up by adding people you know from your contacts, but rather function as subsets to a main group discussion.
You do not have to add everyone from the main group chat to sidechat based on a topic. This allows people to more easily follow the conversations in which they need to be involved – a surprise party for their father or father, or those that interest them – like the schedule of a sports team's training – instead of doing scroll long messages. .
According to Albers, Yahoo Together has seen five times more messages per day than Yahoo Messenger, which, according to the team, was a promising indicator.
Following today's release, the team plans to deploy more functionality as the application evolves.
"Our goal is to create the best product for our audience and the opportunity for consumer productivity in a group messaging environment," says Albers. "We think it's there that this app sets us apart from others in the industry, focusing on the needs of consumers so that they engage with their communities," he said. added.
We still do not know how much attention Yahoo Together will be given, as Yahoo had previously experimented with an application for cash pool group, Tanda, which was closed only a few months after its launch. It is also very difficult to penetrate the messaging space today, in a market dominated by large applications such as Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Line and others.
Yahoo has also not clarified its user acquisition strategy, beyond the full functionality of the application, explaining how it plans to expand its user base. It is therefore not clear whether Yahoo will target the acquisition of users in emerging markets such as India, or whether it really hopes to develop a base here in the United States.
The application is now available on iOS and Android in the global markets.
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