Another messaging service? Yahoo?

Yahoo! Messenger is the mobile client for the popular search engine and email provider. It is a good, fully-featured little messaging app – but it feels deeply lacking in terms of users. At least within the people I know.

Brilliantly bygone

Starting up Yahoo! Messenger, and entering my old Yahoo! login credentials, I was told that my account had been locked. No doubt this is the result of five years inactivity, but still it demonstrated the issue that was to dog me throughout my time with the service – no one I know uses it. Despite the fact that you can now chat to either MSN or Yahoo! users with this messaging service, I know only a handful.

After reactivating my account I was greeted with some out of date spam, and… no one. Everyone was offline. A previously vibrant community was now just a collection of empty chat windows.

Usable but unusable

And, in truth, that is kind of a shame, because the Yahoo! Messenger app itself is pretty good. From within its easily navigated menus, you can access whatever contacts you have and filter them in a variety of useful ways. You can easily change your text’s font, style, and size, as well as add attachments – there is also the ability to take photos and video in-app.

Being an app version of the online chat client, you can also chat to friends from your browser. Like the rest of the service, this works well, with messages delivered quickly (providing you are logged in on your device) – a fact I know because the only way I could find to test the app was to create a second account to chat to myself with.

Only for the Yahoo! users

So, in truth everything is in place for people still ingrained in the MSN and Yahoo! communities to enjoy this – you can even prod your old contacts with SMS to get them to login. But, I am guessing, if you are in this environment you probably know all this already.

Unfortunately, for me it is an empty wasteland. A reminder of an old internet life that I don’t need to resurrect because I have now found my own alternatives.