Yahoo Messenger

Yahoo Chat was a free online chat room service provided exclusively for Yahoo Users. Yahoo Chat was first announced on January 7, 1997, as it was confirmed to be a feature on the very first release of Yahoo Messenger. On March 9, 1998, the first public version of Yahoo Messenger was released, which included Yahoo Chat as one of its features. It allowed Yahoo Users to create public chat rooms, send private messages, and use emoticons.

In June 2005, with no advance warning, Yahoo disabled users' ability to create their own chat rooms. The move came after KPRC-TV in Houston, Texas reported that many of the user-created rooms were geared toward pedophilia. The story prompted several advertisers, including Pepsi and Georgia-Pacific, to pull their ads from Yahoo.^[8]

On November 30, 2012, Yahoo announced that among other changes that the public chat rooms would be discontinued as of December 14, 2012.^[4] quoting "This will enable us to refocus our efforts on modernizing our core Yahoo products experiences and of course, create new ones."

Until the chat rooms became unavailable on December 14, 2012, all versions of Yahoo Messenger could access Yahoo chat rooms.

Yahoo has since closed down the chat.yahoo.com site (which is now a redirect to a section of the Yahoo Messenger page) because the great majority of chat users accessed it through Messenger. The company is still working on a way to allow users to create their own rooms while providing safeguards against abuse. A greyed-out option to "create a room" was available until the release of version 11.

A recently added feature in Yahoo Messenger allows users to connect with their Facebook friends through the messenger.

Download