Goodbye, Yahoo Messenger. Hello, Yahoo together? Yes, Yahoo is returning to the courier space today after closing its previous application due to lack of use. Designed for group conversations among family, friends, clubs and others, Yahoo Together tries to differentiate itself from others through its ability to organize group conversations on separate topics, similar to the IRC model, and its ability to send smart reminders about upcoming ones. events [19659002] The application, previously called Squirrel in beta, was created by the Communications Team in Yahoo, the same people who previously worked in Yahoo Messenger. However, Yahoo Together was built on a new messaging platform, we understand, although it still leverages some existing Yahoo Messenger technology.
Although much of what the application offers is the ability to chat, share photos, GIF, links and reactions: it is not exclusive to the messaging space, Yahoo expects people to appreciate the organizational capabilities in Yahoo Together.
"In many applications, you have a set of people and then a single thread," explains Michael. Albers, vice president of oath and head of communications products. (The oath is also the owner of TechCrunch, but they did not give us access to the beta version for testing, we must take into account.) Corporate synergies, hurray!
"What is unique about Yahoo Together is that it allows you to create Long-term groups, but create an infinite number of separate topics to organize conversations, and where useful, limit access to some of those topics to a subset of the group, "he says.
This, together with support for attachments and a more robust search interface Messenger makes Yahoo Together feel more like a hybrid of consumer group chat and a tool that could fit more into the productivity space, such as Skype or Slack. But unlike Skype or Slack, it does not support calls, and theme-based chats are not designed in the same way.
Use the hash symbol for their secondary conversations, which people can recognize from Slack. But the pound sign was actually adopted for use within IRC networks decades ago to label channels, and Yahoo credits IRC with the idea, in this case.
These topic-based conversations are not just the new chat rooms that are set up by adding people who know their contacts, but rather they work as subsets to a chat in the main group.
You also do not have to add all chat users from the main group to the theme-based sidechat. This makes it easier for people to keep up with just the conversations they need to get involved in, such as a surprise party for mom or dad, or the people that interest them, such as a sports team's practice program, instead to scroll through long threads of messages.
During the beta, Albers says that Yahoo Together saw five times the number of messages per day, compared to Yahoo Messenger, which the team considered a promising metric.
After today's release, the team plans to release more features as the application continues to evolve.
"Our goal is to create the best product for our audiences and the opportunity with consumer productivity in a context of group messaging," says Albers. "We believe that this is where this application differentiates us from others in the space, by focusing on the needs of consumers to interact with their communities," he adds.
It is unclear how much attention Yahoo will receive, as Yahoo previously experienced with a money group application, Tanda, which closed only a few months after launch. It is also very difficult to enter the messaging space in a market that is dominated by important applications such as Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Line and others.
Yahoo also failed to clarify its user acquisition strategy, when asked, further promoting the application's feature set as the way it plans to increase its user base. It is not clear, then, if Yahoo will target the acquisition of users in emerging markets like India, or if it is waiting for a base to grow here in the United States
. The application is available today on iOS and Android in global markets.
