![]() 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.īut the goal was just to get the platform out there and start improving it. He thinks WeChat expanded too fast, and is trying 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 important it should feel. "What happens when you give brands a way to reach people cost-free?" he asks. Bonforte likes the idea, thinks it's the future, but doesn't quite know how to approach it. They're also thinking about what you might call the WeChat effect, the brand- and app-ification of the messaging app. You can have groups within groups, or duplicate those groups to make other groups, or add someone to your group, or leave a group. There are a few features for this already, like the ability 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. They're trying hard to solve that most obnoxious group-chat problem, the one where you're all having 12 conversations at a time and keeping up with what's happening becomes untenable. One feature that's apparently already done but not yet released, much to Bonforte's chagrin: comments. The whole thing was built by the Cooliris team, led by Shoemaker. Messenger borrows tech and expertise from 10 companies, Bonforte says, but three in particular: Xobni for contacts, Flickr for photos, and Tumblr for the ridiculously huge and searchable GIF library. So they hope Messenger can be the first piece of a new puzzle: with it, and eventually many other apps, Yahoo's trying to bring together everything it knows and has into a more powerful whole. Now the company, and its CEO, are in a crisis of sorts. It still has hundreds of millions of users every month, but has lost all the cool it once had. It's bought company after company over the last few years, often without obvious logic. This is the first in what Yahoo hopes will be a new breed of apps. During the past year-"a year and a week," Bonforte says, not that he's counting, and not that he's nervous after blowing a self-induced six-month deadline-Yahoo re-tooled the app for a new era. (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. Yahoo Messenger was once a big name in the instant-messaging space. It has many jobs, but one in particular: make it ridiculously easy to share stuff and then talk about that stuff. The platform underpinning Yahoo Messenger, called Iris, will power many other Yahoo products soon. (That'll save many people from embarrassing drunk texts.) And because everything's on a server and not your phone, Messenger offers an invisible unsend, where you can just *poof* make a message disappear long after you sent it. 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. "We've had so many fights," he says, "because people tell us this is impossible." The technical side is complex, 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 simultaneously. Jeff Bonforte, SVP of communications products at Yahoo, practically giggled. ![]() Send.Ī second later-literally one second, maybe less-all 25 photos popped up on everyone else's phone. He opened a message in the slick new app on his iPhone, tapped the button to insert a picture, and selected 25 photos. ![]() Just before the end of the meeting, project lead Austin Shoemaker discovered, hey, it was working. There was some issue with the new Flickr backend the feature relies upon. The most exciting feature in Yahoo's new messaging app didn't work at all during most of my meeting with Yahoo to talk about its new messaging app.
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