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Yahoo Back into the Chat Business with its New Yahoo Together App

As they say, “It’s never too late”. Yahoo has followed this phrase by launching its new messenger app. Yahoo launched ‘Yahoo Together’, a messenger app, on Thursday, shutting down its older Yahoo Messenger, due to the reduced usage of the app. Yahoo Together is a Yahoo and Oath’s product that it was testing a few months ago, as the invite-only Yahoo Squirrel app. Now, the Squirrel app is out of beta, and Yahoo has launched the same as the Yahoo Together app.

Even, after the data breach happened, on Yahoo’s messenger, in 2013, Yahoo has gathered some courage to enter back into the business. Yahoo and Oath, together have made an effort in the field of chatting, when there are so many messenger apps already available online.

Yahoo Together
Image Source: 9to5mac.com

The Yahoo Together is similar to other chatting apps, except providing more organized experience for the group chats. The app is having way more similarity with the enterprise level chat apps like Slack than any other simple chat apps. But, the app is specially designed for the personnel groups, like family and friends. The look and feel, as well as the custom reactions below the messages, seems to be directly adopted from Slack only.

Like Slack, it supports private and public group chats, that has been named as Topics. One can easily share audio and video files, on these group chats. The Activity View feature of Yahoo Together shows the user every time his/her name is mentioned in the chat. Like any other chat app, the user can mute the notifications for a particular group or a person.

The only feature that differentiates the app from other chatting apps is the smart reminder feature that notifies the user about different events, or of any particular message in the group, by sending the group members a notification about that message. Also, there is no voice calling feature as well as no third-party app integration, available in the app.

The app is created by the Yahoo’s old Communications Team, but with better functionality and features. Although with the chat apps like What’s App, Facebook Messenger and Slack, already available online, the launch of another chat app from Yahoo have raised many questions on its success, in such a competitive environment, Yahoo’s effort is commendable. But, the app surely needs a lot of improvements to survive in the market.