The Fresh Yahoo Messenger App Is Good for Drunk-Texters, WIRED

Yahoo’s Fresh Messaging App Is About Way More Than Texting

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  • Trio hours

A year after he set the world record for holding his breath, he broke it again: twenty four minutes and three seconds. Here’s how bit.ly/2wsVJxq

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Slide: one / of two . Caption: Yahoo

Slide: two / of two . Caption: Yahoo

The Fresh Yahoo Messenger App Is Superb for Drunk-Texters

The most arousing feature in Yahoo’s fresh messaging app didn’t work at all during most of my meeting with Yahoo to talk about its fresh messaging app. There was some issue with the fresh Flickr backend the feature relies upon. Just before the end of the meeting, project lead Austin Shoemaker discovered, hey, it was working. He opened a message in the slick fresh app on his iPhone, tapped the button to insert a picture, and selected twenty five photos. Send.

A 2nd later—literally one 2nd, maybe less—all twenty five photos popped up on everyone else’s phone. Jeff Bonforte, SVP of communications products at Yahoo, practically giggled. “We’ve had so many fights,” he says, “because people tell us this is unlikely.” The technical side is sophisticated, but boils down to this: Instead of taking a photo from my phone and placing it on your phone, everything happens in the cloud, so you’re streaming a photo up from my phone and down to yours at the same time. It uses the same tech to let you scroll back through weeks, months, years of a conversation and see everything without eating much storage on your phone. And because everything’s on a server and not your phone, Messenger offers an invisible unsend, where you can just *poof* make a message vanish long after you sent it. (That’ll save many people from embarrassing buzzed texts.)

The platform underpinning Yahoo Messenger, called Iris, will power many other Yahoo products soon. It has many jobs, but one in particular: make it ridiculously effortless to share stuff and then talk about that stuff.

Yahoo Messenger was once a big name in the instant-messaging space. (When it launched in 1998, it was called Yahoo Pager.) It’s mostly been abandonware for awhile now, an adorably ugly relic of a time when away messages were a defining part of your personality. During the past year—“a year and a week,” Bonforte says, not that he’s counting, and not that he’s jumpy after throating a self-induced six-month deadline—Yahoo re-tooled the app for a fresh era. This is the very first in what Yahoo hopes will be a fresh breed of apps.

Yahoo is fighting to remain relevant. It’s bought company after company over the last few years, often without demonstrable logic. It still has hundreds of millions of users every month, but has lost all the cool it once had. Now the company, and its CEO, are in a crisis of sorts. So they hope Messenger can be the very first chunk of a fresh puzzle: with it, and eventually many other apps, Yahoo’s attempting to bring together everything it knows and has into a more powerful entire. Messenger borrows tech and expertise from ten companies, Bonforte says, but three in particular: Xobni for contacts, Flickr for photos, and Tumblr for the ridiculously ample and searchable GIF library. The entire thing was built by the Cooliris team, led by Shoemaker.

The big question Bonforte’s team attempted to response is, what do people want in a Yahoo messaging app? You’re not going to hammer WhatsApp as a texting replacement, and, oh yeah, people still like texting just fine. The team landed on the idea that people like sharing photos, and like talking in groups. Many groups, of different sizes, all at once. Everything came out of that. “We even think of one-to-one talks as just puny groups,” Bonforte says.

The app is clean and polished, with circle avatars and … whatever, you get it, it looks like a messaging app. It’ll work on iOS and Android, inwards Yahoo Mail on desktop, and in a standalone Web app at messenger.yahoo.com. For the most part, it’ll feel familiar—you can talk with one person or 100, and messages emerge chronologically. At its core, it’s a cleaner and nicer take on GroupMe.

The unsend feature is going to save a lot of people from embarrassing inebriated texts.

Yahoo has big plans, tho’. The team is still working on how to indicate presence, for one thing. Away messages don’t mean anything anymore; in the smartphone age, no one’s ever away. Shoemaker thinks the more interesting method is like a radar ping—if you have the app and opened it ten minutes ago, you’re very likely going to get the message, but if you haven’t used it in a month the odds go down. Facebook’s good at this, Bonforte says, and Yahoo’s still working on it.

At one point during our meeting, Bonforte and Shoemaker began brainstorming all the ways they could better serve low-bandwidth users. Do you ask before uploading full-res photos? Do you only upload it when someone else wants to download it? They’ll get to that too.

There’s lots to get to.

One feature that’s evidently already done but not yet released, much to Bonforte’s chagrin: comments. They’re attempting hard to solve that most obnoxious group-chat problem, the one where you’re all having twelve conversations at a time and keeping up with what’s happening becomes untenable. There are a few features for this already, like the capability to like a message instead of everyone having to say “k” or “cool.” But soon, you’ll be able to comment on a photo or GIF, essentially creating a side-thread in your conversation. You can have groups within groups, or duplicate those groups to make other groups, or add someone to your group, or leave a group. Groups!

They’re also thinking about what you might call the WeChat effect, the brand- and app-ification of the messaging app. Bonforte likes the idea, thinks it’s the future, but doesn’t fairly know how to treatment it. “What happens when you give brands a way to reach people cost-free?” he asks. Spam happens. He thinks WeChat expanded too quick, and is attempting to figure out what he can learn from Yahoo’s history with email to automatically discern what a user should see, what it should look like, and how significant it should feel. And he’s particularly interested in the idea of not bringing everything into a messaging platform, but in making the same messaging platform available everywhere.

But the purpose was just to get the platform out there and embark improving it. (They thought about testing it very first on fantasy football, but “super awesome smack talk” felt a little puny.) Iris is maybe the closest thing yet to a Unified Theory of Yahoo: It’s a connective tissue of many different chunks, bringing messaging to everything and everything to messaging. You find stuff you like—hopefully on Yahoo!—and now you have a place to talk about it.

Bonforte vows Yahoo’s not attempting to take on Slack on one side, or WhatsApp on the other. He’s attempting to chart a fresh path, a middle ground with slew of features but slew of joy, too. He’s crossing his fingers for a hundred million users, he says, because that’s the number you need to truly matter. And he’s thinking that providing people an impossibly prompt way to share photos with their friends might just get them there.

The Fresh Yahoo Messenger App Is Good for Drunk-Texters, WIRED

Yahoo’s Fresh Messaging App Is About Way More Than Texting

Get The

6 months for $Five – plus a FREE Portable

WIRED’s fattest stories, delivered to your inbox.
  • Trio hours

A year after he set the world record for holding his breath, he broke it again: twenty four minutes and three seconds. Here’s how bit.ly/2wsVJxq

Go after Us

Don’t miss our latest news, features and movies.

We’re On

See what’s inspiring us.

Go after Us

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Slide: one / of two . Caption: Yahoo

Slide: two / of two . Caption: Yahoo

The Fresh Yahoo Messenger App Is Fine for Drunk-Texters

The most titillating feature in Yahoo’s fresh messaging app didn’t work at all during most of my meeting with Yahoo to talk about its fresh messaging app. There was some issue with the fresh Flickr backend the feature relies upon. Just before the end of the meeting, project lead Austin Shoemaker discovered, hey, it was working. He opened a message in the slick fresh app on his iPhone, tapped the button to insert a picture, and selected twenty five photos. Send.

A 2nd later—literally one 2nd, maybe less—all twenty five photos popped up on everyone else’s phone. Jeff Bonforte, SVP of communications products at Yahoo, practically giggled. “We’ve had so many fights,” he says, “because people tell us this is unlikely.” The technical side is complicated, but boils down to this: Instead of taking a photo from my phone and placing it on your phone, everything happens in the cloud, so you’re streaming a photo up from my phone and down to yours at the same time. It uses the same tech to let you scroll back through weeks, months, years of a conversation and see everything without eating much storage on your phone. And because everything’s on a server and not your phone, Messenger offers an invisible unsend, where you can just *poof* make a message vanish long after you sent it. (That’ll save many people from embarrassing toasted texts.)

The platform underpinning Yahoo Messenger, called Iris, will power many other Yahoo products soon. It has many jobs, but one in particular: make it ridiculously effortless to share stuff and then talk about that stuff.

Yahoo Messenger was once a big name in the instant-messaging space. (When it launched in 1998, it was called Yahoo Pager.) It’s mostly been abandonware for awhile now, an adorably ugly relic of a time when away messages were a defining part of your personality. During the past year—“a year and a week,” Bonforte says, not that he’s counting, and not that he’s jumpy after sucking a self-induced six-month deadline—Yahoo re-tooled the app for a fresh era. This is the very first in what Yahoo hopes will be a fresh breed of apps.

Yahoo is fighting to remain relevant. It’s bought company after company over the last few years, often without visible logic. It still has hundreds of millions of users every month, but has lost all the cool it once had. Now the company, and its CEO, are in a crisis of sorts. So they hope Messenger can be the very first chunk of a fresh puzzle: with it, and eventually many other apps, Yahoo’s attempting to bring together everything it knows and has into a more powerful entire. Messenger borrows tech and expertise from ten companies, Bonforte says, but three in particular: Xobni for contacts, Flickr for photos, and Tumblr for the ridiculously gigantic and searchable GIF library. The entire thing was built by the Cooliris team, led by Shoemaker.

The big question Bonforte’s team attempted to reaction is, what do people want in a Yahoo messaging app? You’re not going to hammer WhatsApp as a texting replacement, and, oh yeah, people still like texting just fine. The team landed on the idea that people like sharing photos, and like talking in groups. Many groups, of different sizes, all at once. Everything came out of that. “We even think of one-to-one talks as just puny groups,” Bonforte says.

The app is clean and polished, with circle avatars and … whatever, you get it, it looks like a messaging app. It’ll work on iOS and Android, inwards Yahoo Mail on desktop, and in a standalone Web app at messenger.yahoo.com. For the most part, it’ll feel familiar—you can talk with one person or 100, and messages show up chronologically. At its core, it’s a cleaner and nicer take on GroupMe.

The unsend feature is going to save a lot of people from embarrassing tipsy texts.

Yahoo has big plans, however. The team is still working on how to indicate presence, for one thing. Away messages don’t mean anything anymore; in the smartphone age, no one’s ever away. Shoemaker thinks the more interesting method is like a radar ping—if you have the app and opened it ten minutes ago, you’re very likely going to get the message, but if you haven’t used it in a month the odds go down. Facebook’s good at this, Bonforte says, and Yahoo’s still working on it.

At one point during our meeting, Bonforte and Shoemaker embarked brainstorming all the ways they could better serve low-bandwidth users. Do you ask before uploading full-res photos? Do you only upload it when someone else wants to download it? They’ll get to that too.

There’s lots to get to.

One feature that’s evidently already done but not yet released, much to Bonforte’s chagrin: comments. They’re attempting hard to solve that most obnoxious group-chat problem, the one where you’re all having twelve conversations at a time and keeping up with what’s happening becomes untenable. There are a few features for this already, like the capability to like a message instead of everyone having to say “k” or “cool.” But soon, you’ll be able to comment on a photo or GIF, essentially creating a side-thread in your conversation. You can have groups within groups, or duplicate those groups to make other groups, or add someone to your group, or leave a group. Groups!

They’re also thinking about what you might call the WeChat effect, the brand- and app-ification of the messaging app. Bonforte likes the idea, thinks it’s the future, but doesn’t fairly know how to treatment it. “What happens when you give brands a way to reach people cost-free?” he asks. Spam happens. He thinks WeChat expanded too rapid, and is attempting to figure out what he can learn from Yahoo’s history with email to automatically discern what a user should see, what it should look like, and how significant it should feel. And he’s particularly interested in the idea of not bringing everything into a messaging platform, but in making the same messaging platform available everywhere.

But the objective was just to get the platform out there and commence improving it. (They thought about testing it very first on fantasy football, but “super awesome smack talk” felt a little petite.) Iris is maybe the closest thing yet to a Unified Theory of Yahoo: It’s a connective tissue of many different chunks, bringing messaging to everything and everything to messaging. You find stuff you like—hopefully on Yahoo!—and now you have a place to talk about it.

Bonforte vows Yahoo’s not attempting to take on Slack on one side, or WhatsApp on the other. He’s attempting to chart a fresh path, a middle ground with slew of features but slew of joy, too. He’s crossing his fingers for a hundred million users, he says, because that’s the number you need to truly matter. And he’s thinking that providing people an impossibly quick way to share photos with their friends might just get them there.

The Fresh Yahoo Messenger App Is Superb for Drunk-Texters, WIRED

Yahoo’s Fresh Messaging App Is About Way More Than Texting

Get The

6 months for $Five – plus a FREE Portable

WIRED’s fattest stories, delivered to your inbox.
  • 11 hours

A year after he set the world record for holding his breath, he broke it again: twenty four minutes and three seconds. Here’s how bit.ly/2wsVJxq

Go after Us

Don’t miss our latest news, features and movies.

We’re On

See what’s inspiring us.

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Slide: one / of two . Caption: Yahoo

Slide: two / of two . Caption: Yahoo

The Fresh Yahoo Messenger App Is Good for Drunk-Texters

The most titillating feature in Yahoo’s fresh messaging app didn’t work at all during most of my meeting with Yahoo to talk about its fresh messaging app. There was some issue with the fresh Flickr backend the feature relies upon. Just before the end of the meeting, project lead Austin Shoemaker discovered, hey, it was working. He opened a message in the slick fresh app on his iPhone, tapped the button to insert a picture, and selected twenty five photos. Send.

A 2nd later—literally one 2nd, maybe less—all twenty five photos popped up on everyone else’s phone. Jeff Bonforte, SVP of communications products at Yahoo, practically giggled. “We’ve had so many fights,” he says, “because people tell us this is unlikely.” The technical side is elaborate, but boils down to this: Instead of taking a photo from my phone and placing it on your phone, everything happens in the cloud, so you’re streaming a photo up from my phone and down to yours at the same time. It uses the same tech to let you scroll back through weeks, months, years of a conversation and see everything without eating much storage on your phone. And because everything’s on a server and not your phone, Messenger offers an invisible unsend, where you can just *poof* make a message vanish long after you sent it. (That’ll save many people from embarrassing toasted texts.)

The platform underpinning Yahoo Messenger, called Iris, will power many other Yahoo products soon. It has many jobs, but one in particular: make it ridiculously effortless to share stuff and then talk about that stuff.

Yahoo Messenger was once a big name in the instant-messaging space. (When it launched in 1998, it was called Yahoo Pager.) It’s mostly been abandonware for awhile now, an adorably ugly relic of a time when away messages were a defining part of your personality. During the past year—“a year and a week,” Bonforte says, not that he’s counting, and not that he’s jumpy after deep-throating a self-induced six-month deadline—Yahoo re-tooled the app for a fresh era. This is the very first in what Yahoo hopes will be a fresh breed of apps.

Yahoo is fighting to remain relevant. It’s bought company after company over the last few years, often without demonstrable logic. It still has hundreds of millions of users every month, but has lost all the cool it once had. Now the company, and its CEO, are in a crisis of sorts. So they hope Messenger can be the very first lump of a fresh puzzle: with it, and eventually many other apps, Yahoo’s attempting to bring together everything it knows and has into a more powerful entire. Messenger borrows tech and expertise from ten companies, Bonforte says, but three in particular: Xobni for contacts, Flickr for photos, and Tumblr for the ridiculously meaty and searchable GIF library. The entire thing was built by the Cooliris team, led by Shoemaker.

The big question Bonforte’s team attempted to response is, what do people want in a Yahoo messaging app? You’re not going to hit WhatsApp as a texting replacement, and, oh yeah, people still like texting just fine. The team landed on the idea that people like sharing photos, and like talking in groups. Many groups, of different sizes, all at once. Everything came out of that. “We even think of one-to-one talks as just petite groups,” Bonforte says.

The app is clean and polished, with circle avatars and … whatever, you get it, it looks like a messaging app. It’ll work on iOS and Android, inwards Yahoo Mail on desktop, and in a standalone Web app at messenger.yahoo.com. For the most part, it’ll feel familiar—you can talk with one person or 100, and messages show up chronologically. At its core, it’s a cleaner and nicer take on GroupMe.

The unsend feature is going to save a lot of people from embarrassing tipsy texts.

Yahoo has big plans, tho’. The team is still working on how to indicate presence, for one thing. Away messages don’t mean anything anymore; in the smartphone age, no one’s ever away. Shoemaker thinks the more interesting method is like a radar ping—if you have the app and opened it ten minutes ago, you’re very likely going to get the message, but if you haven’t used it in a month the odds go down. Facebook’s good at this, Bonforte says, and Yahoo’s still working on it.

At one point during our meeting, Bonforte and Shoemaker commenced brainstorming all the ways they could better serve low-bandwidth users. Do you ask before uploading full-res pictures? Do you only upload it when someone else wants to download it? They’ll get to that too.

There’s lots to get to.

One feature that’s evidently already done but not yet released, much to Bonforte’s chagrin: comments. They’re attempting hard to solve that most obnoxious group-chat problem, the one where you’re all having twelve conversations at a time and keeping up with what’s happening becomes untenable. There are a few features for this already, like the capability to like a message instead of everyone having to say “k” or “cool.” But soon, you’ll be able to comment on a photo or GIF, essentially creating a side-thread in your conversation. You can have groups within groups, or duplicate those groups to make other groups, or add someone to your group, or leave a group. Groups!

They’re also thinking about what you might call the WeChat effect, the brand- and app-ification of the messaging app. Bonforte likes the idea, thinks it’s the future, but doesn’t fairly know how to treatment it. “What happens when you give brands a way to reach people cost-free?” he asks. Spam happens. He thinks WeChat expanded too quick, and is attempting to figure out what he can learn from Yahoo’s history with email to automatically discern what a user should see, what it should look like, and how significant it should feel. And he’s particularly interested in the idea of not bringing everything into a messaging platform, but in making the same messaging platform available everywhere.

But the objective was just to get the platform out there and commence improving it. (They thought about testing it very first on fantasy football, but “super awesome smack talk” felt a little petite.) Iris is maybe the closest thing yet to a Unified Theory of Yahoo: It’s a connective tissue of many different chunks, bringing messaging to everything and everything to messaging. You find stuff you like—hopefully on Yahoo!—and now you have a place to talk about it.

Bonforte vows Yahoo’s not attempting to take on Slack on one side, or WhatsApp on the other. He’s attempting to chart a fresh path, a middle ground with slew of features but slew of joy, too. He’s crossing his fingers for a hundred million users, he says, because that’s the number you need to indeed matter. And he’s thinking that providing people an impossibly prompt way to share photos with their friends might just get them there.

The Fresh Yahoo Messenger App Is Fine for Drunk-Texters, WIRED

Yahoo’s Fresh Messaging App Is About Way More Than Texting

Get The

6 months for $Five – plus a FREE Portable

WIRED’s fattest stories, delivered to your inbox.
  • 1 hour

"The budge to end DACA isn’t just a gargle to its 800,000 participants, it’s a direct attack on the US economy." wrd.cm/2wCvrYN

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Slide: one / of two . Caption: Yahoo

Slide: two / of two . Caption: Yahoo

The Fresh Yahoo Messenger App Is Excellent for Drunk-Texters

The most titillating feature in Yahoo’s fresh messaging app didn’t work at all during most of my meeting with Yahoo to talk about its fresh messaging app. There was some issue with the fresh Flickr backend the feature relies upon. Just before the end of the meeting, project lead Austin Shoemaker discovered, hey, it was working. He opened a message in the slick fresh app on his iPhone, tapped the button to insert a picture, and selected twenty five photos. Send.

A 2nd later—literally one 2nd, maybe less—all twenty five photos popped up on everyone else’s phone. Jeff Bonforte, SVP of communications products at Yahoo, practically giggled. “We’ve had so many fights,” he says, “because people tell us this is unlikely.” The technical side is elaborate, but boils down to this: Instead of taking a photo from my phone and placing it on your phone, everything happens in the cloud, so you’re streaming a photo up from my phone and down to yours at the same time. It uses the same tech to let you scroll back through weeks, months, years of a conversation and see everything without eating much storage on your phone. And because everything’s on a server and not your phone, Messenger offers an invisible unsend, where you can just *poof* make a message vanish long after you sent it. (That’ll save many people from embarrassing inebriated texts.)

The platform underpinning Yahoo Messenger, called Iris, will power many other Yahoo products soon. It has many jobs, but one in particular: make it ridiculously effortless to share stuff and then talk about that stuff.

Yahoo Messenger was once a big name in the instant-messaging space. (When it launched in 1998, it was called Yahoo Pager.) It’s mostly been abandonware for awhile now, an adorably ugly relic of a time when away messages were a defining part of your personality. During the past year—“a year and a week,” Bonforte says, not that he’s counting, and not that he’s jumpy after throating a self-induced six-month deadline—Yahoo re-tooled the app for a fresh era. This is the very first in what Yahoo hopes will be a fresh breed of apps.

Yahoo is fighting to remain relevant. It’s bought company after company over the last few years, often without evident logic. It still has hundreds of millions of users every month, but has lost all the cool it once had. Now the company, and its CEO, are in a crisis of sorts. So they hope Messenger can be the very first chunk of a fresh puzzle: with it, and eventually many other apps, Yahoo’s attempting to bring together everything it knows and has into a more powerful entire. Messenger borrows tech and expertise from ten companies, Bonforte says, but three in particular: Xobni for contacts, Flickr for photos, and Tumblr for the ridiculously large and searchable GIF library. The entire thing was built by the Cooliris team, led by Shoemaker.

The big question Bonforte’s team attempted to reaction is, what do people want in a Yahoo messaging app? You’re not going to strike WhatsApp as a texting replacement, and, oh yeah, people still like texting just fine. The team landed on the idea that people like sharing photos, and like talking in groups. Many groups, of different sizes, all at once. Everything came out of that. “We even think of one-to-one talks as just petite groups,” Bonforte says.

The app is clean and polished, with circle avatars and … whatever, you get it, it looks like a messaging app. It’ll work on iOS and Android, inwards Yahoo Mail on desktop, and in a standalone Web app at messenger.yahoo.com. For the most part, it’ll feel familiar—you can talk with one person or 100, and messages emerge chronologically. At its core, it’s a cleaner and nicer take on GroupMe.

The unsend feature is going to save a lot of people from embarrassing tipsy texts.

Yahoo has big plans, however. The team is still working on how to indicate presence, for one thing. Away messages don’t mean anything anymore; in the smartphone age, no one’s ever away. Shoemaker thinks the more interesting method is like a radar ping—if you have the app and opened it ten minutes ago, you’re most likely going to get the message, but if you haven’t used it in a month the odds go down. Facebook’s good at this, Bonforte says, and Yahoo’s still working on it.

At one point during our meeting, Bonforte and Shoemaker commenced brainstorming all the ways they could better serve low-bandwidth users. Do you ask before uploading full-res photos? Do you only upload it when someone else wants to download it? They’ll get to that too.

There’s lots to get to.

One feature that’s evidently already done but not yet released, much to Bonforte’s chagrin: comments. They’re attempting hard to solve that most obnoxious group-chat problem, the one where you’re all having twelve conversations at a time and keeping up with what’s happening becomes untenable. There are a few features for this already, like the capability to like a message instead of everyone having to say “k” or “cool.” But soon, you’ll be able to comment on a photo or GIF, essentially creating a side-thread in your conversation. You can have groups within groups, or duplicate those groups to make other groups, or add someone to your group, or leave a group. Groups!

They’re also thinking about what you might call the WeChat effect, the brand- and app-ification of the messaging app. Bonforte likes the idea, thinks it’s the future, but doesn’t fairly know how to treatment it. “What happens when you give brands a way to reach people cost-free?” he asks. Spam happens. He thinks WeChat expanded too swift, and is attempting to figure out what he can learn from Yahoo’s history with email to automatically discern what a user should see, what it should look like, and how significant it should feel. And he’s particularly interested in the idea of not bringing everything into a messaging platform, but in making the same messaging platform available everywhere.

But the objective was just to get the platform out there and begin improving it. (They thought about testing it very first on fantasy football, but “super awesome smack talk” felt a little petite.) Iris is maybe the closest thing yet to a Unified Theory of Yahoo: It’s a connective tissue of many different chunks, bringing messaging to everything and everything to messaging. You find stuff you like—hopefully on Yahoo!—and now you have a place to talk about it.

Bonforte vows Yahoo’s not attempting to take on Slack on one side, or WhatsApp on the other. He’s attempting to chart a fresh path, a middle ground with slew of features but slew of joy, too. He’s crossing his fingers for a hundred million users, he says, because that’s the number you need to indeed matter. And he’s thinking that providing people an impossibly quick way to share photos with their friends might just get them there.

The Fresh Yahoo Messenger App Is Fine for Drunk-Texters, WIRED

Yahoo’s Fresh Messaging App Is About Way More Than Texting

Get The

6 months for $Five – plus a FREE Portable

WIRED’s largest stories, delivered to your inbox.
  • 1 hour

"The budge to end DACA isn’t just a gargle to its 800,000 participants, it’s a direct attack on the US economy." wrd.cm/2wCvrYN

Go after Us

Don’t miss our latest news, features and movies.

We’re On

See what’s inspiring us.

Go after Us

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Slide: one / of two . Caption: Yahoo

Slide: two / of two . Caption: Yahoo

The Fresh Yahoo Messenger App Is Good for Drunk-Texters

The most titillating feature in Yahoo’s fresh messaging app didn’t work at all during most of my meeting with Yahoo to talk about its fresh messaging app. There was some issue with the fresh Flickr backend the feature relies upon. Just before the end of the meeting, project lead Austin Shoemaker discovered, hey, it was working. He opened a message in the slick fresh app on his iPhone, tapped the button to insert a picture, and selected twenty five photos. Send.

A 2nd later—literally one 2nd, maybe less—all twenty five photos popped up on everyone else’s phone. Jeff Bonforte, SVP of communications products at Yahoo, practically giggled. “We’ve had so many fights,” he says, “because people tell us this is unlikely.” The technical side is elaborate, but boils down to this: Instead of taking a photo from my phone and placing it on your phone, everything happens in the cloud, so you’re streaming a photo up from my phone and down to yours at the same time. It uses the same tech to let you scroll back through weeks, months, years of a conversation and see everything without eating much storage on your phone. And because everything’s on a server and not your phone, Messenger offers an invisible unsend, where you can just *poof* make a message vanish long after you sent it. (That’ll save many people from embarrassing toasted texts.)

The platform underpinning Yahoo Messenger, called Iris, will power many other Yahoo products soon. It has many jobs, but one in particular: make it ridiculously effortless to share stuff and then talk about that stuff.

Yahoo Messenger was once a big name in the instant-messaging space. (When it launched in 1998, it was called Yahoo Pager.) It’s mostly been abandonware for awhile now, an adorably ugly relic of a time when away messages were a defining part of your personality. During the past year—“a year and a week,” Bonforte says, not that he’s counting, and not that he’s jumpy after sucking a self-induced six-month deadline—Yahoo re-tooled the app for a fresh era. This is the very first in what Yahoo hopes will be a fresh breed of apps.

Yahoo is fighting to remain relevant. It’s bought company after company over the last few years, often without visible logic. It still has hundreds of millions of users every month, but has lost all the cool it once had. Now the company, and its CEO, are in a crisis of sorts. So they hope Messenger can be the very first lump of a fresh puzzle: with it, and eventually many other apps, Yahoo’s attempting to bring together everything it knows and has into a more powerful entire. Messenger borrows tech and expertise from ten companies, Bonforte says, but three in particular: Xobni for contacts, Flickr for photos, and Tumblr for the ridiculously fat and searchable GIF library. The entire thing was built by the Cooliris team, led by Shoemaker.

The big question Bonforte’s team attempted to reaction is, what do people want in a Yahoo messaging app? You’re not going to strike WhatsApp as a texting replacement, and, oh yeah, people still like texting just fine. The team landed on the idea that people like sharing photos, and like talking in groups. Many groups, of different sizes, all at once. Everything came out of that. “We even think of one-to-one talks as just puny groups,” Bonforte says.

The app is clean and polished, with circle avatars and … whatever, you get it, it looks like a messaging app. It’ll work on iOS and Android, inwards Yahoo Mail on desktop, and in a standalone Web app at messenger.yahoo.com. For the most part, it’ll feel familiar—you can talk with one person or 100, and messages emerge chronologically. At its core, it’s a cleaner and nicer take on GroupMe.

The unsend feature is going to save a lot of people from embarrassing inebriated texts.

Yahoo has big plans, tho’. The team is still working on how to indicate presence, for one thing. Away messages don’t mean anything anymore; in the smartphone age, no one’s ever away. Shoemaker thinks the more interesting method is like a radar ping—if you have the app and opened it ten minutes ago, you’re most likely going to get the message, but if you haven’t used it in a month the odds go down. Facebook’s good at this, Bonforte says, and Yahoo’s still working on it.

At one point during our meeting, Bonforte and Shoemaker began brainstorming all the ways they could better serve low-bandwidth users. Do you ask before uploading full-res pictures? Do you only upload it when someone else wants to download it? They’ll get to that too.

There’s lots to get to.

One feature that’s evidently already done but not yet released, much to Bonforte’s chagrin: comments. They’re attempting hard to solve that most obnoxious group-chat problem, the one where you’re all having twelve conversations at a time and keeping up with what’s happening becomes untenable. There are a few features for this already, like the capability to like a message instead of everyone having to say “k” or “cool.” But soon, you’ll be able to comment on a photo or GIF, essentially creating a side-thread in your conversation. You can have groups within groups, or duplicate those groups to make other groups, or add someone to your group, or leave a group. Groups!

They’re also thinking about what you might call the WeChat effect, the brand- and app-ification of the messaging app. Bonforte likes the idea, thinks it’s the future, but doesn’t fairly know how to treatment it. “What happens when you give brands a way to reach people cost-free?” he asks. Spam happens. He thinks WeChat expanded too quick, and is attempting to figure out what he can learn from Yahoo’s history with email to automatically discern what a user should see, what it should look like, and how significant it should feel. And he’s particularly interested in the idea of not bringing everything into a messaging platform, but in making the same messaging platform available everywhere.

But the objective was just to get the platform out there and begin improving it. (They thought about testing it very first on fantasy football, but “super awesome smack talk” felt a little puny.) Iris is maybe the closest thing yet to a Unified Theory of Yahoo: It’s a connective tissue of many different chunks, bringing messaging to everything and everything to messaging. You find stuff you like—hopefully on Yahoo!—and now you have a place to talk about it.

Bonforte vows Yahoo’s not attempting to take on Slack on one side, or WhatsApp on the other. He’s attempting to chart a fresh path, a middle ground with slew of features but slew of joy, too. He’s crossing his fingers for a hundred million users, he says, because that’s the number you need to truly matter. And he’s thinking that providing people an impossibly swift way to share photos with their friends might just get them there.

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